Latest / WP Builds / This Week in WordPress #386

Transcript

This Week in WordPress #386 · WP Builds

• 0:03
  Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 386, entitled PHP and AI. It was recorded on Monday, the 26th of October, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by Michelle Frechette and Dave Gray, and by Ivana Kirkovic. We talk a lot about AI towards the end.
• 0:25
  Nathan Wrigley: We talk about it in terms of the vulnerability in PHP, which was plaguing everybody last week, but also about the fact that it now seems that AI in an MCP way is going to be landing in WordPress core in 7.3. We also talk a lot about other bits and pieces as well. So the WordPress Contributor Toolkit gets a mention, WordPress credits and the fact that they've now got sponsorship tiers, accessibility, the state of contributing in WordPress, ways of hosting your site for free on Cloudflare, Static and various other ways, and a few plugins which we bring to people's attention as well. And it's all coming up next.
• 1:07
  Nathan Wrigley: On this week in WordPress. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Nice to have you with us. Episode 386, I know, number seems bigger every week. Oh, that's because it is. 386 of this week in WordPress. We're here for about, I don't know, usually it goes on for about 90 minutes, something like that. And we're going to talk about WordPress -y things.
• 1:31
  Nathan Wrigley: In order to make that happen, I'm joined each week by a panel of fabulous people who give up their time, very graciously, I must say. So, big thank you to them. Let's go round the houses and say hello, and then I'll do a little bit of housekeeping. So, first stop, down there, over there, we've got Michelle Frechette. How are you doing, Michelle? I'm well, thank you. How are you? Yeah, good, good, good, good. No COVID or anything this week. Thank goodness. Yeah, feeling a lot more, a lot more human.
• 2:03
  Nathan Wrigley: Michelle Frechette is the Executive Director of PostStatus in And in addition to the work over there, she is also the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, WP Speakers, WP Career Pages and SponsorMeWP. She also runs Speed Network Online and writes things, so is an author, influencer and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress tech events.
• 2:28
  Nathan Wrigley: Living outside of Rochester, New York, she likes to take pictures of nature. And if you want URLs to sum up the whole thing, meetmichelle.online is probably the best one. Thank you for joining us once again. Oh, you've got rid of the blurdy background. That was an Apple thing. All the guitars were blurred. It was a camera thing. Oh, it was a camera thing. Okay. Yeah, so I had to go into my camera and fix things. Also, Michelle fell out of daylight saving.
• 2:58
  Nathan Wrigley: In the UK, yesterday, we lost... Dave, what did we do? Did we gain an hour? We went back an hour, so we had an extra hour in bed. Okay, so we gained an hour? We gained an hour. I never know when that's happening these days. I was saying to Michelle, it used to be that I'd go around as a child and my job as a kid was to just do all the clocks. So the night before, my parents would tell me, you know, do the clocks, move them back, move them on. I'd go around the house and do the clocks. Nowadays, you wake up and your phone or, you know, your internet connected alarm clock or whatever it may be, it's just fixed, right?
• 3:33
  Nathan Wrigley: So, anyway, I didn't know and I forgot to tell Michelle about that, so... It's okay. I had an extra hour of prep time this morning. Okay, that's good. That's good. And we're also joined by Dave Gray. Hello, Dave. Hello. Good to be back again. I've got two bios for Dave. I'll read them both, actually, because I had an original one and then Dave updated it because I think he thought that I didn't have the original one, so we'll do them both. Why not? Dave, a.k.a. Friendly Web Guy, is the man behind ToggleWP, easy for me to say, the ToggleWP plugin.
• 4:08
  Nathan Wrigley: And Website Toolkit SaaS. Actually, they're basically the same, so I'll just add a little bit. Toggle WP is a plugin that helps freelancers turn table stakes WordPress maintenance into a service your clients won't want to leave. And Website Toolkit, a new set of integrated tools to launch client sites with confidence. Yeah, and he's sporting his... I'll do it as much as possible. Can't get the reverse angle right.
• 4:35
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you for joining us once again, Dave. Appreciate it. Dave's been on the show before. Michelle's been on the show before. But Ivana has never been on the show before. Hello, Ivana.
• 4:46
  Ivana Cirkovic: Hi. First time charm. Yeah, that's right. And you're looking very like you've been on holiday. Let's put it that way. Yes. Yes, indeed. Really nice. Hi.
• 4:56
  Nathan Wrigley: Now, the bio I've got is very, very short for Ivana, so I'll just read it out and then you can say a bit more if you want to add to it. The bio just reads, Marketing Specialist at WP Bakery. So, given that that took considerably less time than everybody else's, do you want to add anything to that?
• 5:14
  Ivana Cirkovic: It's okay for now and we can elaborate later through the stories, but yeah, I'm someone who's been working in marketing for 18 plus years. And for the last two years with WP Bakery, helping them turn their business stories into messages and stories that relate to their audiences. So, yeah, happy to be here. I'm just beginning because I've never had a product before. I've always had, you know, like building websites and things like that. And now I've got this SaaS platform, which I'll...
• 5:48
  Ivana Cirkovic: I'll just promote in a minute. It just suddenly occurs to me that, oh, that's why you need somebody like that, is it? Okay.
• 5:57
  Ivana Cirkovic: Yes, exactly.
• 5:59
  Ivana Cirkovic: Stories. Okay, we need stories. I genuinely didn't quite understand it. Not that I didn't understand it, I just couldn't, you know, I couldn't leap in my own head to why those were quite as necessary and now I totally get it.
• 6:14
  Nathan Wrigley: Now, just to say that if you want to join us on this show, we would love that. Typically, we have a bunch of people making comments. The best way to do that is probably to go to this page. If you go to wpbuilds.com forward slash live. There's two ways of commenting over there. YouTube comments are embedded to the right of the player on the desktop and below it on like a phone or something like that. But if you don't have a Google account or you don't wish to comment through Google's platform, then you can click the live chat button inside the video player and that'll...
• 6:46
  Nathan Wrigley: We'll create an option for you to put your name in and then we'll know who you are. So you can do it anonymously kind of in that way as well.
• 6:53
  Nathan Wrigley: It's really nice when people do comment. It keeps the show going. And no doubt, you know, if you've got something to say, the panelists would love to hear it and feedback and whatnot. So let's see if anybody has, in fact, given us a comment. Oh, we have. Yeah, there we go. So, Rhys is joining us. We're going to mention WordCamp Manchester a bit later. Rhys, so stick around for that. He says, afternoon, folks, looking forward to talking about PHP and not AI-like.
• 7:20
  Nathan Wrigley: I'm not really going to do the PHP thing. We've bundled it towards the end because it turned out to be a bit of a damp squib, didn't it? Well, it didn't. It got everybody panicked, but with a, you know, how to describe it, as luck would have it. It didn't destroy everything in the way that we all anticipated it would. And Tako, ooh, what a great panel today. Hi, Al.
• 7:43
  Ivana Cirkovic: Hi, Tako. Hi, Tako. Yeah, isn't that nice? What a nice comment that is. Steve Burge is joining us from the US. Happy Monday, WordPress people, indeed. Hi, hello, Steve. Hello, Steve. Hello, Steve. Nomad skateboarding, I'm guessing that's an icon, an emoji. Yes, it is. It is, in fact, a pink wave of a hand. So, there we go. Hello. Mark Andrew. And also, we've got WP Mark UK. So, that's Mark. I'm getting Mark Wilkinson, yellow, saying hello as well. And then Steve says, my plus. Yeah, I will mention it this week. I'm going to say its name this week. I am actually going to try it.
• 8:20
  Nathan Wrigley: I'm so bad at promoting things, Ivana. I don't know what it is. There's a British bit of me which pops up and goes, be quiet. No, it's the usual fear of business owners. They are, like, taken aback when they need to sell their own thing because of fear. Am I doing it wrong? Am I doing it too much? Do you know what it is with me? It is a bit of fear, I think. The closest word I can get is embarrassment. But it's not quite embarrassment, but it's something like that.
• 8:57
  Nathan Wrigley: Dave, maybe you can empathize with this. I don't know if you feel this a bit, but there's just something very peculiar for the part of the world in which I operate where you talk about yourself in positive terms. That's like a real taboo.
• 9:15
  Nathan Wrigley: Not for everybody, obviously. There's a lot of people who can completely get rid of that thing, but I suffer from it terribly. And so whenever things like this podcast is mentioned or this product that I've got, my immediate reaction is to sort of just brush it one side and go, ah, whatever. Dave, do you get it? Dave,
• 9:44
  Ivana Cirkovic: You must buy it. Well, marketing is not you must buy it, that is sales. Marketing is the importance of what you build. So, let's say your SaaS product, Nathan, you talk about it from the perspective of what it brings to your target audiences. Up until now, we didn't have a platform for podcasts the way you built it and this overall, let's say, platform that enables us to fully emerge, not just to listen to it, but to interact in a way that is easy.
• 10:26
  Ivana Cirkovic: So, you can clip that and use it. That's literally a trillion times better than I would have done. You can write down the notes.
• 10:36
  Ivana Cirkovic: I've recorded it. Yes, he's going to play it back later.
• 10:40
  Nathan Wrigley: Play that back. That's so inspiring, thank you. So Steve, forgive me, I am going to try this week. I am going to get my head out of that sandpit. And I am going to try promoting things a little bit, so you'll see that in a moment. Right, back to the comments. But Ivana, thank you. That made me feel much, much better. Hey everyone, here on time this week. We are on time, yeah. Welcome to the show, Ivana. So is Marcus. Yes, Marcus, that's right. Hello everyone is recovering from... Yes, so WebD.
• 11:10
  Nathan Wrigley: So I'm guessing this is Oli. I'm not sure if it's Oli. This is Oli from WebD, yeah. Oh yeah, it says it at the end.
• 11:18
  Nathan Wrigley: It's been a long week. It's been a long week. That's right. But I did guess it was Oli, so that's quite a good. Marcus, so happy to see the rest of you as always. Courtney's here. Hello, mug of coffee. And then finally Tako for now. out. Thank you. Ivana's bio is way too short, but just tell people to check out all the talks she did at WordCamps around the world. Yay! You can send it. Yeah, I'll send it. Or the other way around. She can send me an invoice. And then Nomad Skateboarding. I've always just been inclined to shine light on others more than myself. Can definitely relate, Nathan. Thank you. Yeah, that's great. Okay, with that in mind, okay, here it comes. Brace yourself, Nathan.
• 12:03
  Nathan Wrigley: It's gonna be okay. This bit I do every week. So this is a piece of cake. So this is WP Builds. This is the website that we have. If you want to keep in touch with what we do, we put our newsletter every couple of weeks. Just put your email address into that field and we'll send you an email. One is when this show is put out, which will be tomorrow morning.
• 12:25
  Nathan Wrigley: We'll put it out as a podcast episode, so you'll get that. Along with a great long list of news articles, many of which we're going to feature, but probably there's double the amount that we're going to touch on today. Stuff that's happened in the WordPress space, so you'll get that. The other thing that you'll get is a notification about when the latest episode of our podcast comes out. So the most recent one was all about Uncanny Automator. We had the developer of Uncanny Automator on, so we chatted about that, which was quite nice.
• 12:55
  Nathan Wrigley: So, next bit of promotional stuff is that our Black Friday page has come around again. If you are in the WordPress space and you fancy looking for WordPress deals, I think there's about, I don't know, like 75 or something like that. What's the number? 72, there you go. 72 people have put their deals on there. It's totally free, by the way, if you want to list your deal. You just click this Add a Deal button and there's a form. You fill it out and, you know, you can come on here, but you can search and filter for all the different bits and pieces. And it's got this.
• 13:24
  Nathan Wrigley: The dates when they're running from and to and the coupon code and the discount number and all that kind of stuff. And if you want to, you can advertise on this page and go like this Pride of Place spot at the top. The top three ones have already gone. That one is a work in progress. Somebody contacted me this morning and they've taken that one. So there's these four if you fancy getting on there and having your product featured a little bit more heavily, then click the little Get Started button there.
• 13:52
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, right. Now, deep intake of breath. Right, here we go.
• 13:58
  Nathan Wrigley: I have a sass. It's called show.fm. I've been building it. I should say I've been persuading somebody to build it for me called Dan Maybe. I don't know if you've come across Dan in the UK. We built a sass to help podcasters do all their podcasty bits and pieces. And now there's probably about 30, 40, 50 people have been through it, something like that on this show.
• 14:24
  Nathan Wrigley: So far, I think it's been working absolutely fine. But basically, the whole premise of it is if you've got a podcast or you've got clients that run a podcast, we do pretty much everything apart from the recording. So the recording and editing, you're going to do somewhere else, but pretty much everything else to do with your podcast will handle for you. So as an example, you can't see it, but the guests on this show have been able to log in over the weekend and chat inside of the show notes and kind of been able to see what's going on.
• 14:54
  Nathan Wrigley: It's kind of interesting watching people chat in the show notes. That's kind of a nice little feature, but we do automation, send out emails, guest reminders. There's a whole guest network. We publish it, do hosting, do analytics. There's an MCP layer if you fancy getting your AI involved with it. So, yeah. And we've got a deal running at the moment until the 31st of October. So there's about five days left. And if you sign up, you'll get 75% off our founders deal, which is three years.
• 15:25
  Michelle Frechette: of our plan. So anyway, there you go. That's my best attempt, which felt a little bit dreadful, but anyway, there you go. I have a show hosted with you, which is not, we don't even have the website built yet, but we've got four, I think four episodes out. And I can say that it works incredibly well and actually has more features than I anticipated and made things incredibly easy for me. There's a lot of features coming. One of the most curious bits, Michelle, is as time goes by and you get more episodes under your belt, if you connect an AI agent, and by the way, we don't do much AI, but I just think given that we're on a live show, this is kind of easy to parse, you'll be able to ask questions of your podcast.
• 16:12
  Nathan Wrigley: So, for example, you'll be able to say things like, which shows were popular and who was on them? And we'll know who was on them. And we'll be able to do things like, because we've got all the analytics and we've got the transcript and we know who spoke and when they spoke and what they said, we'll be able to answer the question, which topics are popular? What things should I repeat again? Who should I have back on to talk about this particular thing? And it's really interesting when all that stuff starts to come out.
• 16:46
  Nathan Wrigley: I've now uploaded about 850 episodes of my podcast and asking questions like that is genuinely interesting what comes out. It's a goldmine of information. It's a goldmine and most of it I never knew. I never knew because all humans have a short memory, right? You do one episode, you do the next, and you concentrate on this one. This enables you to build up that corpus of knowledge through the MCP and ask it. But...
• 17:11
  Nathan Wrigley: That really is only one tiny little corner of what it does. So, Steve Burge, how was that?
• 17:18
  Ivana Cirkovic: Or if you need an elevator pitch, you can just say something like, it's Show.fm, manage WP, but for podcasts. Right, it is. It's like that. It's like end-to-end podcast management. Yeah, yeah, it is. That's exactly right. Anyway, there you go. Check it out, Show.fm, if you fancy that. And we would be very, very welcoming to have you on board.
• 17:43
  Nathan Wrigley: Right. Okay, now it's Dave's Go to promote. One of the things that we do is if you come on this show, you get a little chance to bring some stories along. And that could be self-promotional stuff, or it could be just other things. This week, Dave, obviously in the run-up to, I don't know, Halloween and Black Friday and things like that, he's got a bit of a deal going on one of his products. Here it is. It's called the WP, or the website, I should say, sorry, Toolkit, and it's an agency bundle. Dave, just now I'm putting you on the spot.
• 18:10
  Nathan Wrigley: Yay!
• 18:13
  Nathan Wrigley: Go for it. Tell us what it does and what the deal is.
• 18:16
  Dave Grey: So yes, I've basically got two deals on here. One bit's for kind of website toolkit only. So if you think like your old Swiss multi-tools on things, it does quite a few different things to just an up-level that like a freelancer or a small agency would need on that side. It started off as like a simple technical website audit on there, but it grew into having your go-live sort of checklists, digital customers or client feedback and bits on there.
• 18:42
  Dave Grey: But it's all integrated together. So if you're like a freelance like me doing the occasional site build and things, you've probably got the old Excel spreadsheet or Notion on that bit for all the tasks to go live. Right. They're great, but it doesn't actually know what pages you've got in your site. So say your list said, check all pages on there. You've got to figure out all the pages on that bit. But by having the audit tied into all this bit, it would know all the pages you've got on there. So you can kind of go through and say, I've checked all these bits off.
• 19:09
  Dave Grey: There's little optional feedback widgets as well. So if you're at the final stages of doing your site build. The client can go on there, do visual feedback that ties it all into that site or through, the website toolkit part, but over the last few months have also been doing a complete rebuild of toggle WP, which is basically why we've got the agency bundle, so that if you're doing maintenance services and things on there, you can have like the triple play of potentially saving or growing some additional services for the agency to kind of include in their premium plans for like your AI content assistant and your technical site reviews that ironically passes across to website toolkit and then some other security and other login protection things on that side or through, as well as some excellent sort of modules in there that are really handy for your end client to use on that side through. So I thought rather than just try and pitch one bit, I'll try and sort of pitch two at the same point on there.
• 20:04
  Dave Grey: And yeah, the agency bundles lifetime for website toolkit and one year for toggle WP for 15 sites to kind of help you get sort of tested in that side through. So yeah, it's basically from basically now because I've got the Stripe links in this morning trying to get this bit just in case I happen to mention it on the show until the end of the year. So you've got time to give it a try out. But the best bit is if you... And if you're watching this and click on the Try Demo, you've got a little fully interactive sandbox on there, which is basically your own standalone copy of that bit for an hour, so you can have a play around all the bits in there, and after an hour just self-destructs and disappears on that side, so that you can literally see all the bits that are in there, because I'm one of those people that you can list these things, but what exactly does it do? Well, click on that bit, take it for a spin, and see exactly what's in there.
• 20:51
  Dave Grey: Okay, nice, nice, nice. Yeah, and that's running through Black Friday, right? Yes, so basically from now until the end of the year, just to try and milk as much as possible, because this is a new service on there anyway. I had sort of seven or eight sort of early sales a couple of months ago and been getting feedback from different agencies on there, so it has continuously been developed and built on that side, but yeah, now's a good chance to grab yourself a deal.
• 21:17
  Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. And you can see the price in there. Agency Bundle $349. This is a one-off thing. And the website toolkit only is $249.
• 21:27
  Nathan Wrigley: I will put the links in the show notes, just like all the other bits and pieces that we're going to talk about today. I'll put the links in the show notes so that you can grab them.
• 21:34
  Nathan Wrigley: And then I guess we'll segue into the sort of regular WordPress news. Like I said to Rhys in the comments at the beginning, I'm going to leave the PHP stuff right to the very end. And there isn't a lot, in all honesty, that we're going to say about that. But let's start here. This is Rhys, sadly, some AI news.
• 21:53
  Nathan Wrigley: But this is to say that as of, I don't know, a couple of days ago, three or four days ago, something like that, Matt Mullenweg has given the green light to an MCP being part of a default WordPress install. So it's going to go into WordPress Core. I think there's quite a few people that are a little bit surprised, not that that ever was going to happen, because it felt like that was the trajectory, you know, but the fact that it's happened so quickly.
• 22:22
  Nathan Wrigley: Because it was only a few weeks ago, really, that this whole idea launched and now it's gone into possibly into Core. Obviously, it's not shipping in Core anytime soon, but the idea will be that it will. There's obviously going to be those people for whom this is brilliant, great news. And then there's other people for whom it's, well, why do we need this in Core? This should stay as a canonical plugin. Everything's moving too quickly.
• 22:48
  Nathan Wrigley: And so Ray tries to sum it up in this piece. This WordPress AI team moves to make MCP a default part of WordPress with 7.3 floated as the target. And we're in beta 1 territory for 7.2. So it's months and months and months away, but still kind of interesting that this has been smuggled. That's the wrong word, but, you know, pushed into Core in fairly rapid time.
• 23:13
  Nathan Wrigley: The actual piece about it was this one. This is on make.wordpress.org and it's called AI Contributor Weekly Summary, 21st of October. So it was about five days ago now. If anybody wants to add anything to that, please do. If not, I will wait for a moment and then move on. I would maybe question the reasoning why it is being pushed to core and what it means for the ordinary WordPress users. Like, I understand the hype as a marketer, like AI is everything.
• 23:48
  Ivana Cirkovic: Nowadays, however, the majority of people within or outside WordPress still don't understand, to the full extent, AI capabilities and they don't understand WordPress as well. We see that through WordPress credits initiative, like when we try to bring more young people in, they don't understand and or don't care about WordPress as it is.
• 24:14
  Ivana Cirkovic: And to that equation, to add this another level of some technicality that is still unknown to majority of people, I think that is something that potentially can only push them away. More than bring them in. So, are we making WordPress easier to use or are we introducing another level of something that will be seen as complexity?
• 24:45
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's really interesting. That's mine. Yeah, I have this sort of mixed feeling about it and my mixed feeling kind of goes a bit like this. It feels like everywhere I go on socials, there's that inevitable WordPress is dead, use AI instead. You know, you see it all over the place. And then you get the rebuttal, which is WordPress is not dead and here's the reasons why AI with WordPress is superior.
• 25:12
  Nathan Wrigley: You see that all the time, this back and forth, back and forth. However, when I see something like this, there's a bit of me which feels, is this all happening too quick? Is there a little bit of desperation here where we're trying to just fold tools in because we need to because the world is moving at such a fast pace?
• 25:35
  Nathan Wrigley: Now AI is your website. Okay, you can do it in WordPress. I'm not really articulating what I'm thinking very well, but hopefully you get an idea that it feels like a bit of a mixed message. There's a bit of me which wonders if we're just gobbling up our own user base in a way. Again, I'm not really articulating that very well, but hopefully you get an idea. I understand your point. It feels rushed and like you said, everyone is doing it, let us do as well. But why? I'm the type of person that always questions why. And until there is a solid answer to why, I don't think it should be in 7.3 or the other.
• 26:20
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Like... Just because people are saying WordPress is dead doesn't mean that we need to introduce AI in the core. That is not the reason. Yeah. I'm really annoyed with myself because prior to this conversation, I sat and thought about that article for ages and I had it really clear in my head. And then I read all the other ones afterwards and I've now kind of emptied my head of what was there. But it is this mixed message and it's this, oh, I know the word I want, cannibalizing. That's the word I'm after.
• 26:50
  Nathan Wrigley: If we're kind of in a desperate race to keep up, so much so that some of the things that we may be putting in may be directly cannibalizing the opportunity for WordPress in the future. In other words, if everybody comes becomes very, very familiar with the AI tools, will they learn? OK, well, the next step is I don't actually need WordPress. I've learned through WordPress that I can do all this with AI.
• 27:18
  Nathan Wrigley: Time will tell. I mean, I get it from both sides, and I find the arguments about the pro-AI WordPressers, you know, you still need the backbone and all of the different bits and pieces and all of the things which WordPress is good at. I'm 100% behind that. I get that totally. But equally, if you present something often enough as the solution, I wonder if people are just going to in the end go, well, which bit of this don't I need anymore? Maybe the WordPress bit is the bit that I don't need. Dave, anything on that, Michelle?
• 27:48
  Dave Grey: I'm very much on the fence of, yes, it could be a good thing, but then who's it being added there for? And if you do get that connection in, what's it then going to talk to afterwards? Because you may need other things and different abilities in there to know about those. So it's a bit like, hey, you've got a key for the front door. I don't know the way around the house and things.
• 28:04
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, right. Okay.
• 28:05
  Dave Grey: I was like, yeah, you can get in technically easier once you've set up authentication in bits. But yeah, what happens next? That's not going to be for your beginners doing things. So yeah, it's early days.
• 28:17
  Nathan Wrigley: It's a book sticking exercise. It's so profoundly quick though, isn't it? I mean, really, AI is moving things at the rate at which I just simply can't keep up. You know, you open up like your social feed or your news feed each morning, and I know this is an exaggeration, but every week it feels like something groundbreaking has happened. Whether that be a security vulnerability or a new AI feature which is shipped or some SaaS app that somebody's vibe-coded together or Mac app or what have you, it's almost impossible to keep up.
• 28:55
  Nathan Wrigley: And in that sense, it becomes a little bit dispiriting, doesn't it, when it's all just so fast? Michelle, anything before we move on? I named my AI Sage over the weekend, so I have a very good relationship with him.
• 29:08
  Michelle Frechette: Do you view it like a thing? Like, is Sage a thing in your head? I mean... I mean it's funny right like that's why I did it because it's funny and I just rather than you know whatever but um I do I have been leaning into AI more and more but I and I have conversation with it when I'm trying to work through a problem just because that's how my brain works but at the end of the day I don't be like all right see you tomorrow have a good night.
• 29:36
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah yeah that's coming I'm sure that'll come but yeah um so we've got a few comments about this let's put them up so first one oh the first one is Steve it's about me and promoting yeah I need a t-shirt apparently a t-shirt and a hat and also I feel that thing that hexagonal thing that's not doing very much work maybe that should be a great big logo right thank you Steve appreciate it.
• 30:05
  Michelle Frechette: You need one of those big banners like you used to have strategically placed for the other things you did.
• 30:11
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah okay that's it I'm getting one all right it's done. Tom, how long? Don't know. Right, here we go. So, Nomad Skateboarding says, and it's been truncated, so I'll read it off my screen, which I'll add a little bit more, I feel it's anti-AI that's more of a hurdle for people than understanding the tech, just because developers are all-in doesn't change. Most users of every platform are against AI almost everywhere.
• 30:38
  Nathan Wrigley: That is so curious. So, I genuinely don't have a good metric for how realistic it is for everybody to be excited about AI. Because I'm on the computer 24-7, and social feeds are engineered to keep you, you know, keep you sucked in, I have this impression that everybody's using AI, but I know my kids don't like it, because they can see the theft of their future.
• 31:06
  Nathan Wrigley: My immediate family, as far as I'm aware, nobody's using it, you know. So, maybe I should just be sanguine about it and calm down, because... Nobody really gives two stuffs about it. Okay, Mark then carries on. I guess you could argue similar with the REST API. Yeah, that's a good point. Your everyday WP user doesn't know about it or use it. Yeah, thank you. But it has ended up being very important and opened the doors for a lot of future developments. Thank you. Could it be the same with the MCP? I'm sure you're right. I'm sure it could be.
• 31:41
  Nathan Wrigley: I feel like the REST API, though, doesn't have this, like, massive broad horizon that AI does, where AI can solve so many things in one go. The REST API, I feel, is still quite a technical hurdle, whereas an MCP... But then doesn't the MCP then use the REST API? Yeah. Okay, so it's very meta. Yeah, that's true. Like Scooby-Doo, take the mask off. Oh, there's REST API all along.
• 32:09
  Nathan Wrigley: Thanks, mate. So, um... Yours is Sage, Michelle. James's is Jarvis or Hal. Okay, so there we go. Let's throw that one out there. If you've named your AI, can we have the name, please? Can you put that?
• 32:22
  Michelle Frechette: I actually let my name itself. I asked it what it wanted to be called. Me too. Me too. Did you do that too? That's so funny. Yes. Okay, so here we go. It's already begun. So now we have Brian. My open claw was called Brian. Rest in peace, Brian. It's all right if you just bring it back.
• 32:40
  Nathan Wrigley: Be nice to all the machines. It will remember your kindness. I have found myself writing please and thank you at the end of prompts, which I know doesn't really help. But Anthropic lost 58 billion last quarter, says Nomad Skateboarding. They need everyone to use it, whether it's correct, needed, etc. I think this is a new story which is going to come around very quickly.
• 33:03
  Michelle Frechette: Yeah, I sent you a link about this one this morning. Okay, I'll have a look at that. I did see that. I'll pop that in in a second. Yeah, they're getting ready for their IPO.
• 33:13
  Nathan Wrigley: So their IPO is coming soon and this article, I can't get it into the show quickly enough, but it reveals a 14-fold increase in growth. As it prepares a blockbuster IPO. So really, I suppose the more news lines and items like this there are, the more people will use it and get excited about it. And Nomad's skateboarding finishes off. Check out any of the graduation ceremony speeches where people and adults mention AI. They get loudly booed every single time.
• 33:43
  Nathan Wrigley: You're not wrong. My kids hate it. And it's not just a like a disdain for it. They hate it. They can see the future being taken from them and all sorts of career opportunities that they grew up thinking were available are now evaporating in front of their eyes. It is. It's yeah, it's interesting. So we'll see how that goes. But that depends on the generation. Sorry for barging in. Like kids that are now in high school, they are regretful not being born sooner.
• 34:21
  Ivana Cirkovic: So, when the AI started, grown-ups couldn't have known about it, and them being early adopters could then, like, cheat their way through high school.
• 34:33
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah.
• 34:34
  Ivana Cirkovic: And that is the majority of thinking, because I have a high schooler in my house, and all the kids are like, why haven't I been born sooner?
• 34:46
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so I could cheat. I didn't have to try.
• 34:48
  Ivana Cirkovic: My kids, they just need shortcuts, those youngsters. The ones that are 20 plus, they knew the world before AI, and they know the repercussions of it.
• 35:01
  Nathan Wrigley: I know exactly what you mean. Like, when I was a kid, we had to go to the library and look in books if we wanted to learn something that was unavailable. And then my kids had to sit at a desk and type on a computer. And then, you know, that then got put in your pocket so you didn't even have to switch your computer on. It was just always available. Feels a bit like that. I suppose I'm being a bit of a Luddite and a bit of an elderly gentleman. It does feel, though, that the pace of change is so rapid it's slightly discombobulating and the scope of it as well. Yeah, Michelle.
• 35:34
  Michelle Frechette: However, when I was young and I didn't know how to spell a word and I was told to go look it up at the dictionary, but I didn't know how to spell it, now I can just turn to any, like, voice-operated AI, such as Echo, Amazon Echo, and say, how do you spell X, Y, Z? And it's like, and how do I say this word in Spanish or German or Dutch or whatever? It's so beguiling. You are quite right. There's massive upsides and, I think, interesting downsides. Okay, so Marx is called Bob.
• 36:05
  Nathan Wrigley: And Claude is just Claude. However, so far, the winner, not that there is going to be a winner, there's no prizes here, but Marcus Burnett is called Leopold Fitz. That's brilliant, Leopold Fitz. Good morning, says Steph. Nice to see you. And look at the people in the company, behind the companies and the people who are profiting putting the tech aside. I don't use the word hate, but these are my least favorite people that I'm aware of.
• 36:37
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay. All right. So there we go. There was a fair bit about WordPress and MCP, which is going to be launching possibly in WordPress 7.3 at some point soon. All right, let's move on. Release cycles keep going in the background. So in order to get from 7.1 where we're at to 7.3, we need 7.2. 7.2 beta is now available. And if you want to go check it out, which I would urge you to do, this doesn't feel like one of those cataclysmic releases where there's some major, major, major thing. There's a lot of sort of polish going on here. And I'll just...
• 37:15
  Nathan Wrigley: Tell you about the highlighted items. So, improved global styles and design tools. And so, the idea is there's this new customized filter for finding blocks with modified styles or inherited global style. So, you'll be able to track things down which you have changed or which have been modified at some point by somebody in the past and figure out where things have been changed. Text shadow support. Not a big thing, but I guess quite a big thing. Easier navigation. You'll be able to add, organize, and edit navigation items directly from the editor sidebar, which is quite nice.
• 37:49
  Nathan Wrigley: That's just a little, you know, simple thing, but quite nice. Better collaboration with notes. So, emoji reactions will come and the ability to keep notes and sort of hide them away in its own little draw down the side, which will be quite nice. Media uploads are going to be able to enable you to, prior to hitting your server, your browser is going to do some heavy lifting, so if you upload, for example, a big JPEG, you could automatically get it to convert in the browser to a small PNG or WebP or something like that, and that way it'll never take up space on your server and you won't need a third-party integration to handle that work for you.
• 38:27
  Nathan Wrigley: And then there's a bunch of other things as well. I've seen some work being done on the WP admin area with sort of view transitions, and that all looks really nice as well. But yeah, so if you want to go check it out, 7.2 Beta 1 is now ready for download and checking. Any of you three got anything on that? Any of that standard?
• 38:48
  Dave Grey: Media stuff should be quite nice, because people just put a massive picture up there that it's desktop quality, but you need it that big.
• 38:55
  Nathan Wrigley: It's like, yeah.
• 38:56
  Dave Grey: I was going to say, just smash it down, but yeah, they'd be like, oh right, let's need to pivot slightly. Well, I say pay, I have paid in the past for a third-party service to, you know, suck it up into the media library, it goes off to some third-party server, gets re-downloaded, then put in the CDN and, you know, all of that, and the browser will just do this admirably in the background, and it's been able to do it for years. I remember Pascal Birchler showing this off when he was with Google, literally like five years ago, and now it's going to be in WordPress core, so that's, yeah, thank you, Dave, I agree. Nice little feature.
• 39:33
  Ivana Cirkovic: Yeah, I would just add, yeah, like, not every release needs to be some impressive feature list. Sometimes, like, those usability, everyday usability things matter the most, because you, we need to keep in mind the regular people that are using this, and hopefully get more new ones. So, for those people who are managing websites, small businesses, content creators, like, all this editing, navigation, performance.
• 40:07
  Ivana Cirkovic: تم I'm sorry. Nips and tips are like adding and they help everyday usability in that way. So like I always welcome every better release, whether it's on a WordPress org or within our company that we do and always invite people to test and try it out because with every testing, the next release and the product gets better. So I'm welcoming that.
• 40:35
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Michelle, anything or shall we move on? Yep, let's move on. Okay. So this is not something I will be making use of anytime soon, but very important piece of work. And this kind of, to me, represents a real great example of just how deep and wide the WordPress ecosystem is. So this is Ryan Welcher talking about something called the WordPress Contributor Toolkit. It's reached version 2.0.
• 41:02
  Nathan Wrigley: And this is for people who... I guess the perfect example, which he actually mentions, is if you turn up for a WordCam and you have an intuition that you'd like to assist in some way, it may be that the laptop that you show up with hasn't got the tooling that you need, or maybe you're just playing for the first time and you waste, I'm doing air quotes there, you waste half a day getting everything set up so that for the afternoon you can actually contribute.
• 41:31
  Nathan Wrigley: Wouldn't it be nice if there was a toolkit which would enable that to happen with a couple of clicks? And that's what the contributor toolkit does. It enables you to put all of the bits and pieces that you need to get set up to start contributing at a meetup, at a WordCamp, whatever it may be. And they've gone through a couple of iterations now, so we're on v2 and hopefully it will, well I'll just read, it says the WordPress contributor toolkit removes the point of friction for first time contributors which they face before they write a line of code during contributor days. You don't have to install Git, Node.js, NPM or Docker on your machine.
• 42:11
  Nathan Wrigley: I mean... Version 2.0 brings a redesigned interface which is now available in 10 languages and the core and Gutenberg workflows work the same way as 1.2. So they've redesigned it so that it looks really nice. They've got a new settings area which they didn't previously have so that you can adapt all of the different settings without getting lost. That's quite nice. Like I said, it's in 10 languages which include Czech, Dutch, Canadian English, UK English, Galician.
• 42:41
  Nathan Wrigley: Have I said that right? Is that how you pronounce that? Yeah?
• 42:46
  Nathan Wrigley: Hungarian, Lao, Polish, Serbian and Turkish. What an eclectic range of languages that is. That's amazing. And you can go and look at this article if you want to. You know, explore that in more depth. But the reason I thought this was kind of an interesting piece is, and I said it at the beginning, this to me just demonstrates the breadth and depth of our community. The fact that there's an actual tool for that is so incredible. You know, it just sort of speaks to the amount of people wishing to show up and do these things and WordCamp Asia was a case in point, you know, literally thousands of people wanting to contribute to WordPress and presumably quite a lot of time wasted.
• 43:27
  Nathan Wrigley: Every single time, on every single table, getting people set up. When now you can just click a few buttons and you're good to go. Anything on that?
• 43:37
  Michelle Frechette: I'd never heard of Galician before, so I just looked it up. It's a language in the northwestern part of Spain.
• 43:44
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But amazing that it's been taken care of. There must be an internet, right?
• 43:52
  Nathan Wrigley: I know. It just struck me. I thought that was fun. Yeah, Laos is quite an interesting one as well. I've never met a contributor from Laos, but there you go. Dave, Ivana, anything, or shall we move on? We can move on. All right, indeed we will in that case. Right, okay. So this one actually is kind of perfect for Ivana because I know that WP Bakery and Ivana have been heavily involved with this. So WordPress Credits is a system... Well, Ivano, do you want to run with this whole article or shall I introduce it in the normal way? I don't know if you want to...
• 44:26
  Nathan Wrigley: Introduce it, then I can chime in. Okay, great. Yeah. So this is a program in which... It's run by the WordPress Foundation and it connects students and partner institutions with real contribution work on the WordPress project. So the idea would be, let's say that you're at Pisa University and you would like to do a little bit on the WordPress project but receive from Pisa University credits for your existing degree.
• 44:54
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, that all seems like pie in the sky, doesn't it? Who would do that? Well, turns out a growing list of organizations would do that. And in order to make that credible, you can imagine the amount of paperwork which is going on in the background here for people like Izotta to make this happen. The universities have to know that this is a credible thing that's being set up. You know, we're not just giving you, we call it Mickey Mouse. I hope that's not too offensive. Like a Mickey Mouse course is something where there's not a lot of credibility. You do it, you pay it to the institution, but really at the end of it, it was just a bit of a joke. You know, nobody's going to take it seriously.
• 45:30
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, nobody wants that to be the case, especially the universities involved. And so that's what WordPress credits is. It's being used at a growing number of institutions. I think 17 countries are being impacted by it and 900 students have been through this program. So it's a thing, but the growth of it kind of means that it's maybe outgrowing its own success in a way, which is a good thing.
• 45:57
  Nathan Wrigley: But there needs to be new revenue streams to make this happen. And so, that's what this is. At the moment, companies like Weglot, Automatic have been supporting this program, but there's other companies like, for example, Ivana's WP Bakery, Hostinger, DreamHost, Hosting.com, I don't know how to say that, Riola, I'm going to say, Networked, Cloud86, SmartHost, Villa, Sostaga, Elementor, Mini Orange, and NovaMira.
• 46:24
  Nathan Wrigley: They've all sponsored mentors rather than the whole program. Anyway, now, if you would like to be associated with this and you would like to contribute some money, you can contribute directly into this project. And there are five different ways of doing it annually. There's something called Friend, there's a Supporter tier, a Backer tier, a Champion tier, and the biggest one is the Partner tier.
• 46:52
  Nathan Wrigley: That stops at $30,000. Friend is an in-kind thing, so there's no money directly exchanged. Supporter is $5,000, and all the others are in between. And you can see there's a list of all of the different bits and pieces that you get. So there's my summary, Ivana. Do you want to take it from there?
• 47:10
  Ivana Cirkovic: Yeah, so basically I like how you framed it. The initiative is outgrowing itself and that is definitely true. So for the program that started last year, so only a year old, we really made something very special. The benefit for all the participants, students, universities and businesses supporting are very transparent, meaning students get to learn by doing actual contributing work within WordPress and they get credited for it through their own universities.
• 47:50
  Ivana Cirkovic: Companies that choose to support the initiative, whether through mentorships from their own employees or through donating money, are helping creating... Future Business Opportunities helping in getting to know the students they can then scout for their contributions within their companies. Universities get good PR because they are teaching their students skills that are highly marketable in today's day and age.
• 48:27
  Ivana Cirkovic: So it's a win-win situation for everyone. And now with introducing these sponsorship tiers, we can even grow bigger and help more students and help WordPress itself because we need new people. We need young people. We want to grow even bigger and stay strong as we are. So yeah, if you are interested in WordPress credits program, go to the link that Nathan shared, go through what Lizotta wrote and consider joining. So yeah.
• 49:02
  Nathan Wrigley: The link, by the way, in case you want to Google it rather than wait for my newsletter to come out, so it's make.wordpress.org. That's the ultimate website, but it's called WordPress Credits is Opening Sponsorship Tiers, and I suppose one of the things you may be wondering, you know, if you're working for a company and you're in charge of marketing, the usual, it's got a feel like a normal sponsorship arrangement.
• 49:28
  Nathan Wrigley: So, for example, it's things like names on a partner page, acknowledging a sponsor thank you post, badge on your own site, so there's something that you can display on your own property. Yeah. You get an annual program report, a self-written educational post about the sponsored product, and then as you go towards the bigger tiers, it's things like getting your name as a program partner on the program that you fund, named in Launch Communications and Progress Specific, sorry, program specific report. So, it feels like the kind of thing that you might have found on a virtual summit or something like that, but obviously in this case, it's much more.
• 50:06
  Ivana Cirkovic: It's much more because you can get to see the impact you make for you. Philanthropic, yeah, nice.
• 50:11
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's great, isn't it? So Michelle or Dave, anything on that?
• 50:17
  Michelle Frechette: What I really like about this, so when we have people sponsoring WordCamps, absolutely necessary. I love it. It's an opportunity for companies to be seen, etc. What I like about sponsoring this is not only is it an opportunity for companies to be seen and network through this network, but also because everybody's investing in the future of WordPress, right? So what I love the most about the credits program is we're getting people at the college level, whether they're older or younger, looking at WordPress as a solution.
• 50:50
  Michelle Frechette: I mean, I turned 58 last week. I know that I'm not going to be the future of WordPress. I am the current, you know, of WordPress, but, you know, at some point I'm going to want to retire and I want WordPress to still be here for other people. And so having that... Be the future and having companies invest in the future of WordPress, I think, is just brilliant. And again, it just sort of speaks to ... Okay, so we do this every week, right? Every week we do this show. And a lot of the time we're talking about products and services. You know, so it's hosting, it's security, it's plugins and things like that. That's the mainstay of what we do because it comes around a lot and people are interested in that.
• 51:33
  Nathan Wrigley: But what the heck? Like, this is such an interesting thing and it's going on as a subset of a WordPress thing. I mean, it's just utterly remarkable. There are people out there who are fielding, you know, trying to talk to universities to persuade them that what they're doing is credible, that they can actually justify putting their students in front of these practitioners, these mentors who are giving their time.
• 52:01
  Nathan Wrigley: I'm imagining in most cases for free. Maybe there's, you know, seconded by some company or what have you. And again, it just speaks to the depth. of the project that we've got. And maybe this is the rebuttal of AI that we need. It's like, look at the depth of what's going on inside of WordPress. You know, get an MCP to do that.
• 52:26
  Ivana Cirkovic: Highly unlikely. Well, yeah, in 2026.
• 52:31
  Ivana Cirkovic: Do you know what I mean? There's this sense of there's so much going on in WordPress. And if, like me, you have to make a weekly summary of what's going on, I love this stuff because it's just so impactful. It's got all the right feels to it, hasn't it? You know, students, education, philanthropy, open source. What more could you want? It's so great. It's so great.
• 53:00
  Ivana Cirkovic: Okay. Anybody want to go on that before I move us along?
• 53:05
  Ivana Cirkovic: Have we got any more comments? I don't think so.
• 53:10
  Ivana Cirkovic: Patricia's saying hello. That's nice. Hello, Patricia. Nice to have you. Comments are lagging a bit. The WordPress, sorry, the platform comments are really quite far behind the ones that are going out into YouTube. So sorry if I don't see them in time. But yeah, anyway, there we go. Right, let's move on then. A couple of weeks, Jonathan Bossinger's just posted something. What's he saying? Oh, I'm not going to read that out because it's far too nice.
• 53:39
  Ivana Cirkovic: We were talking about being British earlier, weren't we? Thank you, Jonathan. That's very kind of you to say that. I appreciate it. Right. So a few weeks ago, there was this real brouhaha in the accessibility space in WordPress. I honestly can't remember how it happened. And I don't remember what led to it, but somebody... In a Slack, I'm going to say Slack, was it a Slack comment or a track ticket or something like that, there was this moment where Matt asked somebody to sort of stop contributing inside of the accessibility team and I think said, you know, perhaps use your talents elsewhere and what have you.
• 54:19
  Ivana Cirkovic: And, you know, all of that went off and we didn't report on it because I was having a bit of time off, but this has come as a bit of a rebuttal to that and it's by somebody called Darryl, apologies Darryl, Hilliker, is it Hilliker, yeah, thank you, yeah, okay, Darryl Hilliker, who at the beginning, so it's an open letter, so he is a blind, I'm going to say he because Darryl, I'm assuming that's true, they are a blind daily screen reader user and this whole letter is about that controversy and essentially what they're trying to do is say, what's going on, you know, if that felt to them.
• 55:03
  Ivana Cirkovic: Like, they are now confused about the state of accessibility, what its importance is, how it's being regarded, how much it's going to be a focus in the future, and so that's what this letter is. It's really well written. It doesn't really matter, I don't think, which side of the fence you're on there, whether or not you think that that argument went off in one direction or a different direction, but I think it's really worth reading.
• 55:31
  Ivana Cirkovic: Basically, it boils down to these points. In the spirit of openness that the WordPress project has long championed, I respectfully ask you, and this is specifically directed at Matt, do you consider accessibility a core requirement of WordPress on an equal footing with performance security usability rather than an optional enhancement? What is your plan and the expected timeline for making admin notices perceivable and navigable for screen reader and keyboard users?
• 56:02
  Ivana Cirkovic: Now that the work behind and there's a ticket number has been moved into a future release. That, by the way, was the catalyst for this. It was a whole debate about whether or not admin notices were readable with somebody using assistive technology, and I think the claim was they weren't. Work had been done to make it so that they were, and then it all went off. What authority and role will the accessibility team hold going forward, and how will its expertise be incorporated into decisions that affect disabled users?
• 56:31
  Ivana Cirkovic: What process and criteria were applied in removing Andrea Firstseers? Apologies, Andrea, if that's not how you say your name. And what process will govern similar decisions in the future consistent with the project's code of conduct? What commitment can you make to authors, creators, developers and site owners with disabilities that the tools they depend on? Will remain accessible to them. Anyway, I just thought that was an interesting sort of, you know, counter to what had been going on. I genuinely don't know about how that whole thing developed. As with most sort of news articles, you know, you get the explosive moment where it all happens and then it all sort of dies down. So I don't know if it went off in a different direction or things calmed down or what have you. Anyway, I just thought that was an interesting piece. Anybody want to comment on that?
• 57:26
  Michelle Frechette: We talk a lot about accessibility in the last few years because we want the whole internet, but specifically the work that we do within WordPress to be accessible by people who don't have the same access that most of us do, like screen readers, like the ability just to be able to physically see differences on the screen for those who can't, you know, don't have the whole full color spectrum, things like that. For people who have older eyes like me, not to have gray text on a white background, you know, all of those kinds of
• 57:57
  Michelle Frechette: And so I think it's really important that we keep moving two things forward in WordPress if we want it to be really accessible to everybody. And that's one is accessibility and the other is multilingual. And so we need to be able to have the back end of WordPress be as accessible as we are telling people to make the front end of WordPress. And that's incorporating multilingual and accessibility into the dashboard side of WordPress.
• 58:25
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess only time will tell whether that letter gets a response, but it was certainly certainly an interesting I thought it was really just really well summarized. Basically, they were obviously very worked up about it, but dealt with it in a very kind of, you know, equanimous way. Let's put it that way.
• 58:41
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, Dave, Ivana, if not, I'll move on. Okay, I'll move on. Right. Here we go. Then in that case, we're on to this one. So every time a release of WordPress comes out, there is a sort of a recap.
• 58:55
  Ivana Cirkovic: K.
• 58:56
  Nathan Wrigley: Where people can go and give their opinions on how a particular feature might have landed or basically anything about the release. You can go and contribute. And so this is the post, the recap post for 7.1. So it's the retrospective post, that's what they call it, the retrospective post. So there'll be one for 7.2 and 7.3 and all of the ones going backwards. Now, the bit that caught my attention, though, and this has got me slightly, I guess, a little bit worried is probably the way to put it.
• 59:29
  Nathan Wrigley: So normally you'd read through this and you'd see all the charts. And so, look, there's some charts and there's some more charts. And, you know, it says things like how did collaboration on collaborating on this project feel? Did you contribute to the 7.1 release? Did you have an official role in the release squad during 7.1? What else? You get the idea. Like a load of questions, people give out their responses. But suddenly it occurred to me this number. And I don't know if you can see that.
• 59:56
  Nathan Wrigley: There it is. Four people responded to it. And there's a little bit of me, when I saw that and saw that, there was a couple of things like, you know, is it worthwhile publishing the data from four people? And I think the answer to that is, yeah, four people contributed their information on the understanding that if they contributed it, it would become part of the retrospective publication.
• 1:00:25
  Nathan Wrigley: And so I think the answer to that is yes. But then then the bit of me which started to get worried is, well, how do we go on if this is the level of engagement that we have? So we were talking about, you know, credits and what have you. And I just I just felt a little bit there was I don't know where I'm going with this, really. Just felt a little bit sad, really, that something like this wasn't engaged with. Maybe this is something that just doesn't need to happen. People don't.
• 1:00:51
  Nathan Wrigley: They're not bothered. They just don't want to contribute to a summary publication like that. Then my brain started to go on off in another direction, which is, you know, we've got this sort of slightly declining market share. Does this herald that kind of thing? You know, do we need to worry about the project as a whole? Is it slowly going to be death by a thousand paper cups? Maybe this is the beginning. You know, things like this, which used to be very popular, are now sort of going by the wayside.
• 1:01:20
  Nathan Wrigley: So anyway, there you go. If you want to read that, you can. You'll get the opinion of four different people, which is fine. But maybe this has, I don't know, maybe this has seen the end of its useful life cycle. Or maybe it was just a blip, a one off, and only four people could contribute to this one. But it does sort of worry me a little bit that we've come from, you know, a different place to where we are now with this.
• 1:01:45
  Nathan Wrigley: So nothing really to no question for you at all. But if anybody wants to comment on that, you can. And if not, we will move on.
• 1:01:56
  Nathan Wrigley: We will move on in that case. Okay, right. Okay. So, these next two are about hosting, and they're both about hosting, in this case, on Cloudflare. I've done quite a few of these different bits and pieces, and I always end up backing out. So, the first one is a new and interesting project called Hostless WP, and it says it's called Run WordPress on Cloudflare Workers, okay, not Cloudflare Pages, we'll come to that in a minute, for a free, faster, more secure website.
• 1:02:31
  Nathan Wrigley: One command moves your running site with plugins, theme, and MySQL database, no server to look after, no rewrite. So, go and check this project out. There's caveats, but the idea is you would have a dynamic website, not a static website, all running over on Cloudflare workers, which are amazing.
• 1:02:53
  Nathan Wrigley: And this is a project which hopefully would enable you to do that. There's a new description of how it works, what works, what doesn't, which things are currently enabled, which things aren't. So that was kind of interesting. And then this is Matt Cromwell posted a piece also this week about something extremely similar, but not quite the same. This is his rootsandfruit.com website, which you're looking at now. And if I click around, you'll be able to see, you know, it's pretty snappy.
• 1:03:20
  Nathan Wrigley: It's got view transitions and things, so it loads, you know, in a sort of slightly dynamic way. But he has moved his website over to a static website using the Simply Static plugin, and it's on CloudFlare Pages. And what used to cost him $17 a month, which seems fairly affordable, is now costing him a grand total of zero. And I did wonder if any of you had played with these kind of things. I've put quite a few static websites out there.
• 1:03:51
  Nathan Wrigley: how And there's a bit of me which always ends up needing to come back to WordPress. There's just something I want to do, and I end up back on a normal WordPress website. So, anyway, there's two pieces. If any of you want to describe that, or, you know, you've tried or experimented with these kind of things, let me know. If not, I will move on.
• 1:04:11
  Ivana Cirkovic: I think we talked about... I'm sorry, Ivana, go ahead. No, no, please. You finish, then I will have one question. I think last week we talked a little bit about SpaceFast, right?
• 1:04:20
  Nathan Wrigley: Yes, we did. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:21
  Michelle Frechette: And that's basically, you know, using AI to create a local, or not a local, but a static site as well. And so, in that I've used AI to create a static site, I have done that for sure. Other than that, I haven't created an HTML site in years and years. I've used WordPress only. But does it beguile you? Does the idea of having something that's basically free and probably absent of security problems...
• 1:04:50
  Nathan Wrigley: Is that compelling enough? Because I always end up wanting to do something which is slightly more complex than a normal static website will allow. So, I don't know, something to do with forms that will create a custom post type or something like that. You know, something which you can't do without PHP or a forms plugin being switched on on the back end. So, I kind of always end up crawling back to WordPress. It depends on what I'm building. Because if I'm building something that's just a brochure site, static's fine.
• 1:05:20
  Michelle Frechette: Yeah, it really is. Yeah, it really is. Yeah, I think that's a fair summation. You remember Stratik. When Stratik came out, I know it's not around anymore. But, you know, we had Big Orange Heart on Stratik creating static sites for us through WordPress. So, that was pretty cool. Yeah, Mark makes a good point. He says, how is paying zero for hosting sustainable? It must be somewhere. This is the other big fear, isn't it? Is that everything just goes into Cloudflare.
• 1:05:46
  Ivana Cirkovic: And it disappears and eventually Cloudflare becomes the next, I don't know, evil corp. You have to wonder, yeah, you do have to wonder if something is for free now, is it going to stay free? But Ivana, what were you going to say? It rarely stays free, that's for once. And we were mentioning accessibility. What I wonder, always within these new tools, new features, something shiny, sparkle, I'm like, I'm too old to embrace everything.
• 1:06:15
  Ivana Cirkovic: I welcome, yes, and initiative, but always have to think about how accessible these new setups are for the regular people who don't do development, who don't understand it. Like, yes, depending on the goal of the static page, you don't always need WordPress or any other CMS. However...
• 1:06:43
  Nathan Wrigley: What's behind these new shiny tools? How accessible they are for everyday people? And, yeah, does it stay free? No, it doesn't. So, yeah, I'm very cautious with everything. Yeah, yeah. Dave, anything?
• 1:07:01
  Dave Grey: Yeah, I can see the point of having it on pages because it does just load fast. You literally got nothing else to run behind there. But then when I was reading through this beforehand, it's like, oh, one part of it lives over there, but you've still got your WordPress database where it was to start with. And I know where I host, you would then just open that database up for some other connection sort of through. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to say it's gimmicky. It might be an interesting thing on that side to sort of come through, but I could see the static and the pages being a lot more worthwhile for like brochure sites and things.
• 1:07:31
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, I ended up doing it, I've probably done it half a dozen times, maybe a dozen times, something like that, where I've put out a little site and I ended up going static. But then it was just things like wanting to schedule a post.
• 1:07:44
  Nathan Wrigley: you know, you've got no server that's active. And so you can't schedule a post, you have to spin up the site. In my case, it was either on local or some sort of spawned down dev site somewhere. So bring that back to life, make the post live. So this is on the pages side of things, not on the workers side of things. Bring the site live, publish it, and then shut it all down again. And I guess if you've got a blog or something like that, or forms, it's probably not that ideal.
• 1:08:15
  Nathan Wrigley: But I take your point, Mark. Yeah, it concerns me that if we're constantly in a race for everything to be free, where do we end up with that? And I think the answer is Cloudflare owning everything. I love Cloudflare, though. I find it very hard to be down on Cloudflare because they give so much away for free. So it's pretty cool. Anyway, so HostlessWP is one of them. And Matt Cromwell's
• 1:08:39
  Nathan Wrigley: website is another one. That's with the Simply Static plugin. That's just a plugin. You just literally put a plugin in your WordPress website, point it to something like Cloudflare pages, and you're done. And then move your DNS to wherever your Cloudflare pages are. And it's... It's all done. It's brilliant. That solution does work really well. But yeah. Okay, let's move on. So this one, for no reason caught my attention. There's a project by, what is his name? Austin Ginder, that's it, called MinAdmin, which I've been following quite closely, where the idea is you customize your admin interface.
• 1:09:20
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, this one came across my radar. I think this one was in Remcus's newsletter or Devinder's WP Weekly. Can't remember, but I thought this was curious. It's not new. It's got very few downloads at the moment, 10 downloads. They're on version 1.4.5. But if, like me, you just enjoy faffing with the admin interface, this might be worth a look. It's called Edmin Boost, WP Admin White Label.
• 1:09:46
  Nathan Wrigley: Menu Editor, Theme, Top Bar, Shortcuts. You know, the whole thing. So, I just thought I'd raise that because that's, you know, a little project that I thought was worth mentioning.
• 1:09:56
  Michelle Frechette: I like the cleverness between admin and admin. I thought you had actually misspelled it in the show notes until I clicked the link. Yeah. I'm guessing it's a mixture of edit and admin or something like that. I love stuff like this, though. I genuinely do enjoy faffing with the admin side of my WordPress site. And it's one of those things where every minute that I spend on it, I look back and I think, you idiot, why are you just wasting time? You're the only person actually on the inside of this website looking at it.
• 1:10:28
  Nathan Wrigley: But you want to make it enjoyable. I do. That's the point. Yeah, I want to make it enjoyable. I mean, you're also the man who finds a different web browser every other day, too. Yeah, that's also true. But I do enjoy switching things off so that, you know, things which are in a default install are no longer visible to me. So, turning off a load of menus and stuff like this. So, this kind of thing really appeals. So, anyway, go.
• 1:10:54
  Nathan Wrigley: Go check it out. It's by Ashy Quizlaman, or sorry, wherever you are. Yeah, it'll be in the show notes anyway, but you can go check it out. But also, I just thought, boy, he's got to WordPress. Sorry, he's got to version 1.4.5. He released it two weeks ago. I don't know how many versions are prior to that, but it's got fewer than 10 installs. So I thought, oh, let's throw this guy in.
• 1:11:20
  Nathan Wrigley: Let's give him a boost. That's it. Give him a boost. It looks like a fun little project, so go check it out. Okay, speaking of fun little projects, I don't quite know what to make of this one. So a theme, a block-based theme that I have been making use of a lot recently is Mike McAllister's Ollie. If you've not used it before, I really like it. You know, it does a lot of things out of the box. There's a really credible free version. It's got loads of patterns which enable you to, you know, kind of build some default websites for free. There's a paid version as well. But what I haven't seen in the block space, in the block, you know, in the sort of site editing space and the block theme space is child themes.
• 1:12:06
  Nathan Wrigley: And so when I saw this, this piqued my interest. It's called Vert, V-E-R-T. I'm guessing there's some skateboard reference here. I think Vert is a skateboard thing, move. I don't know. I'm kind of dating myself a little bit. But I scrolled around a little bit and I thought, this is interesting. You know, a child theme for a block theme. Not seen that before. And then as I went further down, there was just something familiar about it.
• 1:12:33
  Nathan Wrigley: And it made me think, who's made this? And it's Brian, Brian from Genesis, who's been around in the WordPress space for absolutely years and years and years. I don't know if this is like a paid thing, because if you look down here. There's a kind of an option for you to give him your first name and email address. So I don't know if it's going to be like he's going to put you on a wait list or something like that. But anyway, there you go. It's a new thing on me, a child theme for a block theme. So if you fancy it, if this site appeals to you and you think, yeah, that looks pretty good, maybe go check it out. Yeah, Brian Gardner. There it was. That's how I knew at the bottom. It said Brian Gardner.
• 1:13:19
  Nathan Wrigley: So he used to have a project which... Genesis? Yeah, but after Genesis, when he went to WP Engine, he was working on a block theme as well. And I've forgotten what it was called. But maybe he's abandoned that. Cotton? Is it called cotton? Cotton. Cotton? No, but is it like, it's like that. It's something fluffy. Yeah, no, but it's like cotton or pattern or something. I've forgotten. Anyway, so there you go. And James is saying that Ollie is amazing.
• 1:13:49
  Nathan Wrigley: So, okay, maybe it's a solid foundation. Maybe him and Mike have got together. Yeah, but Mark, web dev, sorry, Ollie, I should say, is saying, why would a block theme need a child theme? Well, that was kind of what I thought. That's the bit that puzzles me, Ollie. I don't know why it would need a child theme, but there it is. You can go and check it out.
• 1:14:14
  Nathan Wrigley: Sign up. Sign up. Join the waitlist. For more. You can find out. Okay, should we get into the thing that never was? The bit that kept everybody awake during the course of this week, the PHP. How many hours were wasted? I put a tweet out this week, which was very, it's probably, I say it was a tweet. It wasn't a tweet. It was out on LinkedIn. I don't use LinkedIn very much. And, you know, so if I put a message out on LinkedIn, typically, I don't know, 10 impressions or 20 impressions.
• 1:14:45
  Nathan Wrigley: This one had like 6,000 or something, which for me was in a bit of an anomaly. And all I basically said was, Do we need to start thinking about, and I didn't say the word regulation, but do we need to really rethink what's available to everybody all the time? Because my understanding is that during the course of last week, somebody from a software company, and I've forgotten the name, basically pointed their inexpensive AI at PHP and said, find me a vulnerability.
• 1:15:24
  Nathan Wrigley: That's my understanding. You know, it was a simple little request. And the AI went, oh, yeah, we'd love to do that, and then found what on the face of it was about the most catastrophic problem we could possibly have. That then leaked, and so what was supposed to be a normal release cycle and the hosts were supposed to be updated, it went out in the wild. It had like a CVE score of 9.2, although people like Patchback were saying this is a 10.
• 1:15:57
  Nathan Wrigley: And I don't know if any of you are managing your own servers, but it felt to me like Tuesday and Wednesday, almost everybody in our industry stopped working and did patching of their PHP's, of their servers, and made sure that everything was okay. I don't know if that was the case where you are. Let's tackle that first. Did any of you three spend time faffing with this? I know I did. In my case, my host mainly took care of it, but it was still on a few, I've got a few little servers dotted around the place. I had to get those all fixed.
• 1:16:31
  Dave Grey: Dave, did you? Well, I should manage places. So one host is behind Cloudflare that put the interim rules in to try and stop that to kind of go through, and the other one's got their own bit to sort of look after. But yes, it's kind of checking through every like half hour to see if any version numbers have changed on anything on that site or through. Right, right. And I think the more of the fallout for that bit was one of my other customers kind of like enterprise level on there. And all of their end customers then got in contact with their operations first and say, have you been affected by this bit?
• 1:17:00
  Dave Grey: So I then got about three different emails from three different people with. Is your supplier affected by so-and-so? Is there a third or fourth party of blah, blah, blah on there? Like, it's a WordPress brochure website. I think they're kind of overblowing it a bit on that side, sort of, through. But yeah, it was basically the following day that had more aftermath from everyone else thinking, are we affected by this? But then say, this has already been covered on there. You don't need to panic on that side to sort of come through. But yeah, it's kind of a bit Y2K. Was it less of an issue because people have put things in place and got the patches out quickly?
• 1:17:30
  Dave Grey: Or if you just did the whole, oh, it's not a major problem, and then half the internet melted, it'd be like, whoops. Oh, yeah. The reporting very much felt like this is going to be an absolute nightmare. If you don't get this fixed, you know, people are going to be able to basically go into your server, take control of it, and do whatever the heck they like. That was how it was being portrayed.
• 1:17:52
  Nathan Wrigley: As luck would have it, it would appear that because of a variety of different things, like you've got to perfectly time things to happen in coincidence with other things and a bunch of other constraints, it didn't turn out that way. And we'll get to that in a moment. But anyway, my message that went out on LinkedIn was like, Is this normal? You know, is it OK that an AI can go and cause this chaos, lose countless thousands of people, probably millions of hours of time? And is that all right? Or do we need to have some of this regulated? And I prefaced it with, I do not have the answer. I don't know what it is.
• 1:18:32
  Nathan Wrigley: But I'm not allowed to sell medicine for a blooming good reason, because I would be killing people. You know, I'd give out all the wrong medicine to all the wrong people because I don't know what the heck I'm doing. So years and years ago, governments decided that stuff, we're not going to make it possible. And I'm wondering if the state of AI now is such that we do need to regulate it a little bit.
• 1:18:58
  Nathan Wrigley: You know, there needs to be some consequence to this. I don't know. I don't have the answer. Ollie's saying that he spent all day updating PHP and on VPS server. So you lost a day. I wonder how many people like you lost a day. And it wasn't your fault. You didn't do anything wrong. And yet somehow this thing escaped into the wild. Yeah. Who's this? This is Mark saying, if you were with a managed WordPress host and they didn't solve it, surely it's worth moving. Otherwise, what is the managed part? Yeah. Yeah. Good point.
• 1:19:31
  Nathan Wrigley: And then we've got Mark also saying, was it AI that caused it or the human that leaked it? You know what? I think you could cut that both ways. It was both. I don't think the humans could have done it without the AI, is one thing that I would say. But I'm puzzled by the prompt itself. It literally said, find bad vulnerabilities in PHP. And it was something that was buried for years and years.
• 1:20:00
  Ivana Cirkovic: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. In WPBakery, our dev team were on top of everything. We worked with PatchStack to secure everything in place. We just wanted to... Uh... Update our client base. So we created an article around it with what should be the recommended steps, how to tackle everything. So we rolled out that. We rolled out newsletter to inform everyone. So it wasn't a big task for us.
• 1:20:39
  Nathan Wrigley: The amount of time that you spent doing that as a company, it's several dozens of hours probably, and quite a bit of anxiety and heartache and worry and all of that. It turned out it wasn't that big of a deal.
• 1:20:55
  Nathan Wrigley: But you do wonder, like the next time, I think basically what I'm trying to say is, imagine the day when it really is bad, when it really, really is bad, and your health service goes offline, your bank stops working, yada yada, you know, just invent a cataclysm of things that could happen. At that point, we're all going to be going, oh, you know, we had the warning signs, didn't we? We knew this sort of thing was possible. Maybe we should have done something about AI. And as I said, I don't have the answer.
• 1:21:26
  Ivana Cirkovic: Yeah. Mark has a question. AI finding problems is a bad thing? No, it's not. It's the human part in not foreseeing that and having to have artificial intelligence point out. So what other things they can, like, discover before we do? So that is a security issue on its own.
• 1:21:54
  Nathan Wrigley: Everything that Mark says totally scans, right? It's completely true. Like, it isn't the AI's fault. The AI just found the bad thing because it was told to find the bad thing. Like, all of it's true. And I do not have the answers. But I feel like we dodged a bullet this week. And it could have been a lot worse. And I guess there's a bit of me which is just that if... If we get into a scenario where this thing's happening more and more frequently, which I think everybody in the security industry would say is true. I was chatting to somebody this week who is in the WordPress security industry and the broader internet security industry, and they're basically saying, it's not fun anymore, you know? The fun has gone out of this. It's now just brutal from top to bottom.
• 1:22:40
  Nathan Wrigley: Awesome. So I don't have the answer. I'm just sort of raising what I think might be the problem. Patricia says that she servers with xCloud and the PHP was available, the patch was available immediately, so that's nice. And back to what you said earlier, there are many good reasons for, oh, okay, there we go. There are good, so block themes. There's a good reason to have block themes and Patricia is actually building one. Thank you. It sounds like you're asking for these vulnerabilities not to be discovered. Yeah, it does sound like that, doesn't it?
• 1:23:11
  Michelle Frechette: I agree. I think it's more don't disclose them until we have a solution. Do you know what? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. I suppose it comes down to a phrase like this. And when- Normal humans have godlike powers, which I think you could argue AI in some senses does. Do some of those humans do stuff which we've wished they didn't. And if some humans with godlike powers can do some things which we all wish they hadn't done, the only recourse you've got is either to figure out who the heck these people are, which you can't do.
• 1:23:54
  Nathan Wrigley: Or to dial in what the AI is capable of, which we seem to be unwilling to do, because we all see how incredible AI is in so many other areas. And so it's this difficult, like, managing thing. And I'm just sort of playing it forward like, whoa, where will we be the day after the real absolute nightmare? Where will we be? What will we be saying to ourselves? And all of the arguments will sound fairly hollow at that point.
• 1:24:21
  Michelle Frechette: But we're not there yet. But I think with AI, we also still have that trust but verify, right? Because like, it wasn't just last week. Yeah, on the 9th, I think it was that Claude sent a notification to a police station that they had a tip on solving an unsolved mystery and it was just fake. Everything was wrong. And it apparently did it on its own. So we have to just be really careful.
• 1:24:47
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, I'm just confused by it all. Yeah, I'm just confused by it all. I definitely don't have the answer. And Mark, everything that you say checks out. I mean, you're completely true. We want these vulnerabilities to be discovered and patched and it's just the speed at which they happen and also the lack of prior investment you might need to have. So as an example, the PHP vulnerability, maybe that would have just taken a really, really skilled human being a very long time to stumble across.
• 1:25:19
  Nathan Wrigley: And in this case, it was the the nature of the prompt, you know, it was like, just find me a vulnerability in PHP and off you go. As as we're saying here, though, Ollie saying not heard of a single site. No. And it turns out it was a it really didn't pan out that way, did it? You probably could have left all of your servers just as they were the day before. And nothing would have happened because of the the the nature of it. In fact, somebody over the weekend, I don't know if you saw this, somebody put $2,000 worth of Bitcoin on a vulnerable server and said, it's yours. If you can compromise with PHP to shell, you can have the $2,000. And it took it took over a day for one individual to get there, which demonstrates, you know, how difficult this was to exploit.
• 1:26:08
  Nathan Wrigley: I don't have the answer. An AI? No, it was a human, wasn't it? It wasn't an AI that disclosed it, says Mike. It was a human being. That's my understanding as well. Anyway, so this post is the Atlantic write-up, where they basically say that, you know, in all the panic, we ended up relying on whoever that is, Andre Sturey, so he suddenly sort of went into the limelight, and by all accounts, it was just like really calm, you know, just like, oh, I'll do what I can do, you know, it'll be fine.
• 1:26:41
  Nathan Wrigley: So, this was the post that the PHP Foundation put out, which we were all staring at, hoping for our, you know, PHP version to tick over to whatever was safe at some point, and then Mark Maunder, who's the co-founder, the founder, I don't know if he's a co-founder, founder of WordFence, this is a day later, basically saying, there's nobody exploiting this, you know, it sounded like a nightmare, but, you know, he's tagging people from Patchstack and Matt Mullenweg, and he's basically saying, it sounded like a nightmare, but really, nothing happened.
• 1:27:18
  Nathan Wrigley: Um... Yeah. So there you go. The sort of security vulnerability that never was. However, you know, there were others. So RankMath has had a problem this week. So if you've got RankMath going on any website, make sure to get that checked. And also OpDraft Plus or OpDraft Central had a fairly severe one as well. So if you're running either of those two plugins, you might might want to check that out, particularly the OpDraft one, because they had a problem with their keys and it feels like the only way to fix it is to rotate the keys.
• 1:27:53
  Nathan Wrigley: You can't fix it by updating the plugin or anything like that is my understanding of it. Anyway, so I don't have the answer, but, you know, I feel like the AI stuff is going to be more and more interesting in the days, weeks and months to come. I think that's it. Were there any comments in that as you saw scroll by that I missed, Michelle or anybody else? Do we get them all? I think we're good. Got them. Okay, great. In which case, we'll knock it on the head. We will say a great big thank you. We've got to do the waving. I will not forget that, but I'll save my thank yous first. Thank you, Michelle. Thanks for joining me. Thanks, Dave, and thanks for Ivana. I hope you all feel like you can come on another time. And also, thank you to you if you made a comment, or we're just lurking around in the background and didn't make a comment, but enjoyed the show. Great. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining us. That's lovely.
• 1:28:46
  Nathan Wrigley: So, Ivana, you may or may not know, we do this slightly humiliation. Oh, all right. So, yeah. I've been a long time. Whoa, Michelle, what the heck happened? What? How is that a Mac? That is a surprise now. Yeah, if you do these hands with a Mac. And if you've got this, if you've got it turned on, it'll do that.
• 1:29:12
  Michelle Frechette: Hang on, how do I do that? I don't know. I never turned mine off, so I don't know how to turn it off. No, I've got options, but I can't figure out how to make them work, so I should just leave it.
• 1:29:26
  Ivana Cirkovic: But she's all coming up with new things.
• 1:29:31
  Nathan Wrigley: We're just doing the old thing. But there you go. Thank you so much for joining us. If the three of you want to hang out for a minute afterwards, that's lovely, but I'll end the show now. Let me just find the right button. Yeah. All right. So we'll see you next week for This Week in WordPress. Bye, everybody. Take it easy. Bye-bye.