# This Week in WordPress #332  ## Episode metadata - Episode title: This Week in WordPress #332 - Show: WP Builds - Owner / Host: Nathan Wrigley - Episode publish date: 2025-04-29 - Duration: 01:29:34 - Episode URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/episode/616b689f-79ee-4856-bf0b-a0ca83018f8b) - Show URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/show/11e8bcf5-550e-4d5b-a024-6b2775756bc4) - Export date: 2026-02-17T23:27:25 ## Snips ### [PressConf's Unique Intimacy](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2cf1b466-ceb1-4ab9-adc6-d692e5f5faf4) 🎧 16:42 - 21:31 (04:48) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/bc8783e9-c960-4a41-a192-bdabaa5cd903" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - PressConf created a safe space for speakers to be vulnerable and authentic without recording or photography. - The event fostered deep connections and heartfelt moments through intimate group interactions and shared meals. #### 💬 Quote > because it's not recorded and we don't record it as attendees, and we're not taking pictures of slides to put out, it really does create a freer space for the speakers to be wrong and vulnerable > — Michelle Frechette Michelle Frechette on the atmosphere at PressConf #### 📚 Transcript thought of it so tell us about so i mean first of all what happens at press conf stays at press conf so i really can't talk about it. No, I will say it. I mean, you can look at the speakers and the topics on the schedule. But I will say that because it's not filmed, recorded, whatever the word we use. Every time I say film or tape, I just age myself. I know what you But because it's not recorded and we don't record it as attendees, and we're not taking pictures of slides to put out, it really does create a freer space for the speakers to be wrong and vulnerable in how they present their topics. And I will say that some of the speakers hit your heart so much about what they were talking about that it was if only for two or three of the talks, I would have spent the money to be there and in the room for those. But all of them were amazing and the networking opportunities and the extra day at the end to hang out and go cart or golf or just hang around the pool or whatever you wanted to do and you know go to lunch with people go to dinner with people I'm never early up early enough to get breakfast with anybody but that's another story some people were jogging in the morning and I'm like my scooter's not charged yet sorry So it was really worth it. Yeah. The stuff that obviously my only interaction really with it was on the on the social media kind of things. And what I was quite surprised by was in the build up, there was a very large amount of social media posting about, you know, I'm going and then the inevitable, you know, here I am at the airport kind of post and all that. And then I was expecting to be this cavalcade of social media posts at the event. And actually the opposite happened. It went dead quiet. And I'm presuming that's because there was some sort of mutual agreement that, you know, like, no, it was just. Not really. I mean, we weren't really supposed to tweet about the, you know, people are saying in their sessions right per se but you know usually you'd still see a lot of selfies and things like that it's that there was it was such an it created such an intimate environment that you didn't even think to pull out your phone to take those photos too often right like we were having such great conversations that it wasn't like oh and by the way say cheese kind of thing you know so so how do you i usually take a ton of pictures and i hardly took anything what what is it that what's the metric so when you say having great conversations what what is it what's the sort of slightly different secret sauce if you know what i mean that that separates it obviously you've described that it the the numbers you didn't say this but i know the numbers were much much smaller so i think it was somewhere in the region of like 140 something like that 40 150 something like that yeah everything happened up on in the same place so there was one track no meals were provided outside you know so you had to organize that so that kind of also created this mechanism for getting together with people and things yeah so what what if you could try to put your finger on it the one thing that was it what would it be i think uh so there's a couple things that really led to that it had a higher price tag and it was in kind of a distant location for a lot of people right so? So I think what that did is, and I hate to say it made it a more elite event in that the people who were there spending more money to be there tended to be some of the bigger names or more insider WordPress people, as opposed to we didn't, I don't think I saw a single person who was like, hey, I just learned WordPress and I want to know more. Like you would get at a WordCamp, for example. And because you had to be intentional about who you're going to lunch with, it wasn't like, well, I got my tray. Where am I going to sit? Right. So you were choosing the small groups. I mean, it kind of happens naturally, of course, but to get together with and be like, hey, a bunch of us are going to this place for dinner. Who wants to come? I think the most people I ate with at any one time was, was eight or nine. And that was that with Cammie and one evening and she's, you know, in the comments here. And it, I don't know how to explain it really, but like the first, not the first, very first night. Cause I got in really late, but the first full day I had dinner with Marcus and Bud and we laughed and had so much fun together that I think I was going to cause Marcus to spit out his tea at one point because of some jokes that we were telling. And Bud, of course, Bud and I like to like to bounce off one another. I call him curmudgeon. He calls me insufferable. And yet he picked up the trap for my meal at the end. So, you know, it was that kind of event. It's hard to really explain --- ### [Theme Switcher Pro Powers Flexible Design](https://share.snipd.com/snip/83a25725-26d5-466b-9d4e-2616baff1df8) 🎧 28:10 - 33:04 (04:53) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/897327ef-1181-428f-9ea4-ca6484508fb0" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Theme Switcher Pro lets you use multiple themes simultaneously on a WordPress site. - This enables gradual site redesigns or unique themes for different content areas without staging sites. #### 💬 Quote > you can have a different theme on pages and posts than you do on the overall site like you can switch granularly within your website > — Michelle Frechette Michelle Frechette explaining Theme Switcher Pro's feature #### 📚 Transcript week? So this is the newest release from WebDev Studios. I was talking to Brad Williams. And Nathan, you and Dan are going to be on Post Status Live this Wednesday to talk about Page Builder Summit. Next week, Brad will be on to give more information about theme switcher pro but what's really cool about this because he demoed it for me which was phenomenal is you can have a different theme on pages and posts than you do on the overall site like you can switch granularly within your website so let's say you want to landing you want to create a landing page that's a different theme altogether that lends itself really well to what you want to do or you want your blog to have a different look than your main theme you can do that without causing any issues in your site that's interesting so it's all yeah yeah so basically you can theme different things separately i mean that's always been part of the deal when you sign up for wordpress is you get a theme and you know if you really want to change things you're going to be fiddling with template files or i guess in the era of fsc it's a little bit easier than right and you think about it like a lot of times people will put like they'll put learn dash or lifter on their website and they create a subdomain for it because they want it to have a different theme right this way you wouldn't have to do that because you could theme it for your lms so you could theme it for you know whatever accessory you want to put on your website maybe it's a store or something like that you can do that very very easily and you can start to switch over your site page by page if you do want to switch your theme without ruining the whole site and having to redo it oddly that strikes me as one of the most beneficial uses of it i imagine for most people the idea of having two themes is probably more than they want but if you are in the process of just wanting to i don't know you don't want to have a staging site you want to just over many many weeks you want to just slowly morph one site into another um that's so interesting okay so it just read the blurb on it. It says, we're thrilled to unveil Theme Switcher Pro, a powerful new WordPress plugin that empowers you to multiple themes on your WordPress site simultaneously, all built on, oh, sorry, all based on customizable conditions. So that means to me it's a classic theme. However, it says whether you're transitioning to the block editor or managing diverse content types theme switcher pro offers you the flexibility you need seeing i guess that this offer is still valid because it's on the top of the web page there seems to be some sort of discount 20 off of the first 100 customers using that code there let's see how much it is because that's always of interest and there is no light version this is so elite and such an amazing product that they didn't even want to deal with putting it through a light version into the repo it really is worth a 299 a year for your site or your agency at 600 that is fairly powerful pricing let's just put it that way. $299 for one website and then up to five websites. So that's per annum. Dollars, I should say. And $599, so $600 if you want up to five websites. Interesting pricing. Okay, so you can find that at themeswitcher.com. themeswitcher.com. Interesting. Any thoughts, Tim? Well, I mean, I quite, I was, while we were chatting, I was like, yeah, you know, it's sort of thing I could definitely use. I've got, my main website is bodged, is the best way to describe it. And it's taken years to get it to migrate to a new theme because it's too bodged in places. And that's like, oh, yeah, this is a process that i wanted to every time i'll be honest i was i was up to the point going oh after this i might go and buy that i i'll be honest when i saw the price i went for a personal site maybe not but i can certainly see where in a professional agency you might want to use it or let's say you just want to switch over one site then you really only need it for one year you won't need it to to have a subscription that's not how projects work yeah one year to switch over a site yeah i'm gonna laugh um but i think that's kind of curious because if you did adopt that you could literally change your website from one theme to another so let's say you've got old theme and you've got this target theme where you want it to get. And I don't know, you've got many, many different layouts and templates and what have you. Just being able to do it in your hobby spare time and just, okay, this week I've tackled one of the pages or one of the templates and then I'll just do another in a month or so. That I can see. In fact, in many ways, that feels to me like an untapped market. I wonder if it speaks to that in the content of that website. I didn't spot it that way, but that feels to me almost like a really interesting pivot to offer it to those very people. --- ### [The Limits of SEO Traffic Lights](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1f45db78-3d4c-42e4-b282-2e64a6d8a7c2) 🎧 36:30 - 41:11 (04:40) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/994ca175-2c3f-4838-ae48-390d141a3e77" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - SEO tools like Yoast sometimes cause users to prioritize 'green' scores over meaningful content. - True SEO success demands focusing on authentic, human-centered content planning, not just tool checkmarks. #### 💬 Quote > the green you know the traffic light system that they put in that in hindsight became a crutch for many people if it wasn't green it wasn't right > — Michelle Frechette Michelle Frechette discussing Yoast SEO plugin reflections #### 📚 Transcript And this is called The Unintended Consequences of Making SEO for Everybody. What did you make of this? What was the reason you brought this to our attention? I just love when somebody can look back on a project and say, this is what went really well. This is where we wish we'd done something a little bit different. And I think we can all learn from those kinds of things. And he's not saying, but he's touched with the imagination, but yes, the plugin, like, well, you should just give up on it. For sure. Not like that at all. Right. But the idea that you create a tool that people then use over rely on the tool is what I got from it. So like you have, like, I'm only writing to make it turn green, you know, in the, in the traffic light type situation. And that makes sense, right? Like if you write first and then you keep changing your keywords so that it turns green, you did not write it well, right? So like you should have your keyword first, right around what you're talking about, as opposed to what did I write? Okay. We keep changing the keyword until I, it matches what I wrote kind of thing. So you really should be planning for content, not planning for the tool. Yeah. That's what got out of it. Yeah, it was kind of interesting. By the way, John. John, overall. Hang on, just to check. Is that John of the chickens? I was going to say that. Oh, that's so good. No, it's John or Jonathan overall, as I kind of know him as Jonathan. And it says, where did John go? And, yeah, so I took from this article that in some ways there were bits and pieces they built into the tool, which if they had their time again, they wouldn't add in because there came to be this reliance on well the tool tells us like one of the that he says is the green you know the traffic light system that they put in that in hindsight became a crutch for many people if it wasn't green it wasn't right and you know this sort of anecdotal thing that he said one day, like, you know, Google likes 300 words articles. That got misinterpreted as Google said, write 300 words at least, whereas that wasn't the case. And I think it's a call for just authoritative, genuine, human, innovative content, as opposed to don't just follow the check marks. Just do the thing that the plugin says. I have a confession. I will often hit publish without a green light. How? Jim's coming after me. I know. I was going to say, there's an even better solution. There's a filter to turn it off. Which I have done. I've worked at a company that I worked at for previously. had an employee who would write blog posts to meet this the traffic lights and they were rubbish and but and they got obsessed about it and they were slowing down and so i just one day i just turned the filter off so the traffic lights weren't there yeah and they went where'd they go and it's like but i don't know just vanished. Yeah, they've discontinued that feature. Absolutely gone. Write better. And they might come in. The content went up much, you know, they started writing with their voice again because they lost the way that they wrote. The whole point for bringing them on was that they were the character, they were that voice. And this was obviously before generative AI, but that's what they effectively became so robotic. They might as well have just written the content via AI. I guess if you have a voice or you're a good writer, then you probably never really relied on that stuff all that much, although you may have relied on it as a cue for what when is it you optimized but if you imagine that you're writing just for the optimization algorithm it's not going to be probably the thing that most people wish to read but the flip side of that is if you are a an unconfident writer and you know the blank page is some kind of version of hell for you then i guess it does give you something to aim towards. Have you got the right keywords in there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe Yoast is speaking of a day where, well, certainly at the moment, it does seem like the algorithms are changing. People are relying on ChatGPT and that kind of thing as a mechanism for search. And I don't suppose for a minute that chat GPT will care too much about, you know, getting a green traffic light. Yeah. Yeah. It is a good, it is a good check for yourself, right? Like I will sometimes forget to put at the bottom, like, you have questions, contact us on our contact page, which is an internal link. Yeah. And I'll be like, Oh yeah, that seeing that there are no internal links reminds me that I wanted to put that at the bottom. Yeah. Or perhaps --- ### [Deepen WordPress Security Skills](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a0af530e-80b3-4c5a-902f-aee81b8c49e0) 🎧 45:33 - 52:44 (07:10) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/f2ef93c3-640a-47a3-938c-651bb39760c5" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - WordPress professionals should deepen their security knowledge beyond superficial or overly technical courses. - Tim Nash's comprehensive nine-module WPSecurity101 course targets practical security skills for client-facing WordPress users. #### 💬 Quote > It's not a course necessarily for developers or for system administrators...but it is for somebody who works with WordPress every day > — Tim Nash Tim Nash describing his WPSecurity101 course #### 📚 Transcript You will do it. Yeah, you will do it and you'll enjoy it, damn it. He has got a new offering. The website is going be dead easy to remember. It's WPSecurity101, so the numbers 101.com. WPSecurity101.com. And the headline is, take your WordPress security skills to the next level with Tim Nash. Okay, Tim, engage, difficult part of your brain to engage, but engage it anyway. Give us the marketing speak. Tell us why you've done this, who's it aimed at, and all of that good stuff. So before I do that, to give you an idea of how terrible I am, I've owned this domain name for nearly 10 years. Okay, that's it. I am proud of you. Can I just say, just to be clear, I don't think there were too many problems in WordPress security until about the 28th of april i reckon 2025 it got really serious they were just you know and i can see the future being really bleak so yeah okay with that said so yes so i've owned this debate name for a while i've been thinking about this for a very long time i originally when i was sort of first i when i finished i many years ago i was running a dev agency. And as I was coming to the close, I was thinking, what do I want to do? And actually, at the time then, I was sort thinking, you know, I really wish that was a really good WordPress security course. Because what tends to be is either these very superficial courses, which ultimately are install, plug it, have a nice day. Everything will be fine, sort of level. Or there are a few super, super deep, really complicated courses designed for penetration testers and people in the security space. What there wasn't was an in-depth sort of fundamentals course on WordPress security for WordPress professionals themselves. And so I was like, well, I'm going to do this, but I need to do it justice. And so I ended up going along and it took about, you know, six years or so from going, well, I think I've got the idea basics down now for making this into a course. And I've ran parts of this before as workshops and I've worked with agencies to train their staff. So I've taken all of that knowledge. I've distilled it down into a professional development course. So this is meant as a professional development course for WordPress professionals. It's not a course necessarily for developers or for system administrators. You don't need to know how to run servers and how to write code, but it is for somebody who works with WordPress every day. And it's probably best suited for people who have WordPress, who work with WordPress on behalf of clients. The course is going to be made up of nine modules. It's a learn at your own pace, there are modules there are labs there are quizzes at the end there is an examination at the end to see if you've done if you've got all of it right and certification which will be valid for a specific period of time so it's something that i hope over time will become a standard that will be people will be able to you'll be able to say i did this course here is my certificate and there'll be a way of your employer verifying that so i'm hoping that that means that it comes with a little bit of um gives a little bit of professionalism to a space that currently actually lacks that unless you go down a security pen testing qualification route and yeah it's not for sale today today i launched the website a lot of it's been done i'm not willing to put anything on sale even at massive discounted price until i've completely filmed all of the content but if you register your interest you can get on the mailing list. I'm going to be sharing some of the modules ahead of time with the mailing list exclusively. So you'll be able to see some of the content. And once I finished recording and I have like another block of recording to do, I need to go get a haircut. beard what once that recording block's done i'm going to put the course on for pre-sale just the mailing list at a discounted price and the goal is to give it um open it up to everybody else and launch it fully launched at the end of may nice does that sell scene enough yeah no firstly well done i know that that doesn't come naturally to you, but that was brilliant. Secondly, dear listener, Tim comes onto the show. And obviously, we all adopt a bit of a persona, don't we? We're all jolly and we talk and have a nice time. Tim is the real thing. Tim knows his stuff. I'm not really a developer. I can sort of hack my way at PHP and I'm kind of dangerous. Tim is not me. Tim really, really, really understands what he's talking about. And so this won't be some sort of tin pot course thrown together without thought. I'm saying that. I haven't seen it, but I know you. I trust you. The version I'm sending to Nathan is going to be on tin pot. Install plug-in, smile. Yeah, that's right. Can I ask you to scroll all the way to the very bottom I can the absolute last thing on here I was delighted where is the cookie banner the site doesn't use tracking cookies for its analytics nice I love that nice nice that is very cool um you expect especially from out of the UK you expect that banner pop-up to be like, do you love? Yeah, yeah, So let's just run through the four, sorry, the nine modules. So just to give you some sort of oversight, I suppose, of what's going on. The first module is introduction to WordPress security. There's a bullet point list. I won't go through it all. But then a discussion of user management. That's module two. Module three is update management, all crucial things. Browser security. That's interesting. That is fascinating. I didn't even think that would be something I would need to worry about, but of course it is. Configuration management is module five. Then we move to module six, hosting and backups. Module seven, monitoring. Module eight, the real hole in my knowledge would be this one, compliance. And then module nine is called that one, putting it all together. So the intention is to have this launched by the end of May. But if you were listening carefully there, you'll have noticed that there's a register form on the page. And if you put your name into that email list there, then you're going to get a special offer when the course first drops, available only to the people on that list. So once more, WP Security 101. Learn from one of the best, from Tim Nash, all about WordPress security. And good luck with that, Tim. How far are you through the recording of it? Because that is a painful process, I know, only too well. Yeah, we're over the two-thirds mark now. Oh, great. Most of it is now scripted out. Yeah, that is well done. Okay, so it's definitely, definitely, definitely coming around. --- ### [AI Powers Sophisticated WooCommerce Scams](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1323c127-f905-4ec0-bfe9-8e3f096a3b9d) 🎧 01:02:35 - 01:06:39 (04:03) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/feb41b09-f7d9-4b97-a831-f583456f5340" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Phishing campaigns targeting WooCommerce have become increasingly sophisticated, using AI to craft convincing emails. - Users must remain vigilant and never trust unsolicited emails asking to download patches or software. #### 💬 Quote > Historically you could spot a phishing email because of the spelling mistakes... now ad actors have access to ChatGPT, they can just get the AI to do it for them > — Tim Nash Tim Nash on AI-enhanced phishing scams targeting WooCommerce #### 📚 Transcript It's patched out. Fake security vulnerability phishing campaign targets WooCommerce users. Of course it does. Why? Why? But tell us what's going on. Well, I picked up this article for two reasons. The first was, there's a fake security vulnerability for your campaign targeting brute commerce users. Actually, when I went to start to do a little bit of digging for this, because I was going to contact my own clients, I actually realized that it's a relatively small... I know they describe it as widespread, big scale, but in widespread, big scale spam and this sort of phishing campaign, it's not that big, but what it is interesting is to see when people pick up that these phishing campaigns have been happening and they're developing. And I think I read the article and it was a bit of a mean comment, but I read the article and at the end of it, I turned around to a friend and said, hmm, do you think they got caught in this scam? Because this is the sort of thing that you see, because that's how these would make the news in the first place. that we do do these articles and we do tell people when these are happening because it is so easy to fall for it oh and phishing emails are getting better so much better historically you could spot a phishing email because of the spelling mistakes the weird grammar issues the fact that it looked wrong but now ad actors have access to well chat gpt yeah yeah they can just say make convincing email phishing attack and chat gpt goes sure i'll make you a convincing phishing attack here you go they don't even need to have to guess what might pull on your heart strings because they can just get the ai to do it for them so this is a really good example where you end up on a page that looks like a woopage and it's telling you to download the patch now that should ring alarm bells for a lot of people because a pack that's not how woocommerce does its updates you do your updates through the wordpress admin area or if you're in a dev agency that's using composer or something like that you do it that way you would never have a patch that you'd have to download and install but plenty of other pieces of software do have a patch that you can download and install so you recognize the words it sounds super scary. And obviously, anything with security, we take seriously and we deal with straight away. Like making a course, for example. Yeah, definitely. But so people will go and install it. And once you've installed the patch, things happen. It nicks all your passwords and sets you up to DDoS other people's sites. So, well, I'm not so worried about this particular phishing attack. I thought it was really good that Patchdack are highlighting this as a concept. And as always, never, ever trust something that comes in an email that says download something. Yeah. Or even click me as a link, especially if you didn't ask for it. I just think the playbook that these people must be running off is so refined now. There's just so many errors that they've made in the decades that they've been doing it. now it's like even to the point that, I don't know, they bought the domain security-woocommerce That all looks legit. You just glance your eye up to where's this? You see the word woocommerce.com. You might not parse the bit in front of it but also the landing page where they send you looks really legit i'm showing it on the screen i mean it just i i actually don't know what the wo landing page for this might look like but that looks fairly credible it's even got the new branding yeah exactly i mean yeah there's no red flags there, is there? There's shouting at you as, look, this just looks poorly executed. And again, ChatGPT could quite easily scrape anything from anywhere and give you it back. --- ### [WordPress 6.8 Updates and Jubilee](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d3d11775-12d0-4a20-8f6c-56a1a44d51a1) 🎧 01:07:23 - 01:11:33 (04:10) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/bef33a20-4331-4639-814b-25087a354fa9" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - WordPress 6.8 brings new APIs enhancing block management and previews. - Matt Mullenweg announced a community 'Jubilee' to unblock many previously blocked WordPress.org users, improving community relations. #### 💬 Quote > all the human blocks, community guides, directory guidelines, and as such will need to be followed going forward... pre-existing blocks are considered bugs to be fixed > — Nathan Wrigley Nathan summarizing WordPress Jubilee and unblocking #### 📚 Transcript There's quite a lot that has been unpacked on this show about that, but I wanted to just mention that Birgit and the crew at Gutenberg Times have created an article all about the different bits and pieces that is in there, along with just some other content from around the WordPress space. So I'll put that into the show notes. And where am I going to go next? Self-promotion, I'm sorry. I chatted to Ryan Welcher, who's an automatician. And he spoke to me when I was in Manila at WordCamp Asia all about what is new in, well, 6.7 it was at the time, but also 6.8. And he talked a lot about the APIs that are new in WordPress. So I'll just highlight it here. The block bindings API, the template registration API, preview options API, and although it's not an API, the data views as well. So if you want to know about all of the different bits and pieces, Ryan really is a jolly good expert. One thing that Ryan does, he has a YouTube and a Twitch channel, and it's called Ryan, what is it called? Ryan Welcher Codes, I think, all as one word, Ryan Welcher Codes. And if you've got a problem in the block editor, something that you as a developer can't see your way past, he does live coding and he's open to suggestions. So if you've got something that is really causing you to pull your hair out and you can get it to Ryan, he does on a weekly basis, tries to unpick not only problems that he thinks are interesting, but other problems that people send him. So that kind of could be interesting for people out there to watch as well. We stay away from this topic quite a lot, but I thought it would be worth mentioning. Maybe there's some sort of sea change going on at the moment. mollenweg posted a piece on the 22nd of april and when i read it i didn't quite i didn't get the context of it um but it was just called wordpress jubilee it's on wordpress.org so it went out to i don't know how many tens of thousands of people there was you know obviously millions millions okay thank you because think about it it's installed on every wordpress website yeah good yes yes thank you good point um and so the the context of it was lost on me at the time because the piece is just called wordpress jubilee and it turns out that jubilee is a word which catholics resonate with but i'm not catholic and didn't know what that word meant, so I didn't quite get the title. I Jubilee to me is like celebration. It's almost like you could substitute the word for party or something like that. And the piece says, as I said, we're dropping all the human blocks, community guides, directory guidelines, and as such will need to be followed going forward. But whether blocks were in place before are now cleared, it may take a few days, but pre-existing blocks are considered to be, considered bugs to be fixed. And I genuinely, I wasn't sure what that meant. But then a little bit of context came the following day. And I think on Twitter and various other platforms, there'd been a whole bunch of people being blocked from a variety of different things, for example, the WordPress Slack and make.wordpress And so it turns out I'm now looking at Matt's personal blog. It's ma.tt, and this piece is called Reflecting. And I didn't realize that Matt is Catholic. The Pope, obviously, if you are a Catholic, this would have been terribly important, but the Pope passed away very recently, and seemingly it caused Matt to have a reflective moment. And he said that he's going to start unblocking, I think, everything. I think everything. So if you're one of the people that did get caught up in the block, and there's a bunch of people in the UK who got caught up in that the the block should disappear and so then going back to this comment on wordpress.org this bit here where it says um pre-existing blocks are considered bugs to be fixed what i'm reading in that is if you're still blocked, that's an error and your account should come back online. --- ### [Use AI for Image Alt Text](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4a920fba-a2bb-495a-b789-6435a47d97c2) 🎧 01:22:46 - 01:27:27 (04:40) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/ce2fbf32-5626-48e8-83fe-0e697346402e" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Use WP Descriptor's AI to generate image alt tags and descriptions to save time. - Always verify and edit AI-generated content to ensure accuracy and maintain context relevance. #### 💬 Quote > My relationship with AI is a trust but verify > — Michelle Frechette Michelle Frechette on using AI tools for image descriptions #### 📚 Transcript Make this maybe the last one with a few minutes to spare. This is WP Descriptor. I don't know whether I trust AI with these kind of things, but the idea here is that WP Descriptor, you'll download the plugin, activate and it will attempt to take out the, in inverted commas, I'm doing air quotes, the dull work of creating, you know, alt tags and descriptions your images. Reading through the blurb, it seems like you invoke an AI. The AI does its work, injects things into the meta fields for description and, you know, what have you, depending on what you've got set up for images. And it'll just work out of the can. Pricing is 1,000 credits is $20, 5,000 credits is $50. I don't know what a credit actually equates to, but maybe this is something you've got to do on daily basis and you want to get out of the grind. Like I said, I'm a little bit skeptical. No, not skeptical. That sounds a bit blunt, but do you know what I mean? I'm not entirely sure I want hand over control of this to an AI based upon the fact that it seems to go wrong about i don't know tenth of the time it just goes off off the rails would you trust this either are you um i think if it was if you're doing bulk uploads via ai and you're not then editing and doing editorial control then no as you say, it's inevitably going to do something terrifyingly bad and put the worst case scenario in there where you're going to suddenly go, your picture of an apple will get described as some sort of scene of torture. You're going to be there going, well, obviously that wasn't what I meant. But if you're presumably still reading over the description. Okay, there we go. Yeah. But if you're putting an image in a page for some reason, presumably you're doing it for a reason and you want to give something about that image over to the reader, so doesn't it make more sense to what your thoughts were with the image and the reasoning for it's rather than necessarily the wider i know that an alt text should be about giving a description of an of the image of what's actually in the image yeah but it's all context it's still context driven and there's got to be some sort of an image portrays feelings as much as it does physicality so i i can't help but feel that you'd be losing some of your own story if you let an ai do the description yeah i kind of feel some of this busy work that we've got to do we've kind of we're slowly but surely just sort of saying okay none of those tasks need to be done If an AI can do it, an AI can do it, and it should do it. And it does feel that – anyway, there is the product. If that is meaningful to you and you think you can make use of it, give it a whirl. They go to – they say here, what makes it different? And they say, unlike other tools, WP Descriptor doesn't just stop at SEO. It creates human-friendly, engaging descriptions that connect with your audience. Your images will no longer be background elements. They'll be powerful assets that contribute to your content success. You will caveat emptor. You will have to try it and see how you can. My relationship with AI is a trust but verify yeah okay yeah you know so bulk maybe is not the best way to go about these kind of things but if you uh you know if you're going to do the things at a time maybe that will work let's just put a few different well just before then in the comments john's john john john has actually used it perfect there. There we go. Ah, great. Okay. So there we go. Oh, that's lovely. Right. So we've got a ringing endorsement from John. It's a fantastic plugin and we've been it since beta. Saves tons of time. So we don't really have time, John, but if you can, like, does it do a credible job? Like the images that you've dropped in there, does it actually give something back that you think that does align with what's actually in there? Would you perhaps trust it to be on autopilot even? Because that's the bit where I would worry. I would worry that it would go do all the busy work in the background and then I would be left picking up the when it just said something in Sendury. One credit is one description. Okay, thank you. That's helpful. It also helps when going back through a site lacking in the info. Okay, so that, yeah. Okay, I can imagine in a scenario where you've picked up a site and there are thousands of images that have got nothing, definitely better to have something than nothing. Again, the caveats that we mentioned earlier. You also get an opportunity to modify what the AI offers. Okay, so that's great. --- Created with [Snipd](https://www.snipd.com) | Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts