Latest / WP Builds / This Week in WordPress #384

Transcript

This Week in WordPress #384 · WP Builds

• 0:03
  Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress episode number 384, entitled Steve Lick to Hammer, sponsored by Show.fm. It was recorded on Monday, the 5th of October, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley and today I am joined by three fabulous guests. I'm joined by Rhys Wynn, Raquel Manriquez and Steve Burge. It's a WordPress podcast, so we definitely talk about WordPress, but we also get into all sorts of other things like events and drinks and AI and really getting off the rails in various different places.
• 0:40
  Nathan Wrigley: But on the WordPress side of things, we talk about the roadmap to 7.2, we talk about PressConf, about Manchester, the resurrection of the WordCamp over there, a podcast which Steve did. We get into the interactivity API and all the different bits and pieces happening around that. We talk about a new WordPress theme called Delta. We also talk about the Presence API. Something I had not heard of. Is the WordPress plug-in repo getting deluged? The answer, in short, is yes. And as I said, we go off the rails a lot of times. And it's all coming up for your delectation on This Week in WordPress.
• 1:23
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, I, for one, had forgotten how annoying that music is. That music's really annoying. I've got to change that music. I've had it for about eight years now. And every week it's the same. Just change the music, Wrigley. And I never do.
• 1:36
  Nathan Wrigley: We're back! It's been ages! I decided to take a load of time off for the summer and then launched a Sassat and just got busy, basically, and decided I'd put this on hold so I could concentrate on that. But we're back. And the intention is to do every single Monday from now...
• 1:54
  Nathan Wrigley: Until WordPress is no more. So, for ages. But it's This Week in WordPress. We're on number 384. And if you are joining us live, appreciate it. Drop us a comment. That's really nice. The best way to do that is to go to our live page, wpbuilds.com forward slash live. It's got YouTube comments embedded on the right hand side of the player if you're on a desktop, but there is a little widget inside the actual video player.
• 2:23
  Nathan Wrigley: It says live chat. And if you don't want to be on a Google account or anything like that, you can just use that if you prefer. That's nice. Come and give us a comment. Send people in our direction. I can see a few people have already done that. Before I introduce our guests, let's say hello to some of our commenters. Hello, Patricia. Nice to have you with us. Thank you. Thank you. Courtney. Hello. Courtney's going to be on next week, I think. Very nice to have you with us as well. Steve, Steve Woody. Hello.
• 2:50
  Nathan Wrigley: Hello, Steve. We've also... Nero's? Nero's? Nero's? I'm going to call it not your music. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. You see, we're in agreement. Yeah, I know. It's terrible. Basically, what's the problem here, Nero's, is that I'm just lazy. That's the truth of it. It would take me eight minutes to change that music, wouldn't it? But I seemingly can never be bothered.
• 3:17
  Nathan Wrigley: Patricia's back. Missed you and the show. Thank you. That's very kind of you. Webcam E, happy to see you all. This is lovely. And WP Bakery, welcome back. That's lovely, lovely. OK, so the idea is to talk about WordPress-y bits and pieces. And in order to do that, we always have a panel of different people joining us. And you can see I've got three people joining me today. I'll start... Where will I start? I'll start with Raquel. Hello, Raquel.
• 3:42
  Raquel: Hi.
• 3:44
  Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Yeah, it's like four in the morning or so. What time did you say it was? It's not quite that bad.
• 3:50
  Raquel: Well, it's 545 when, yeah. I'm less coast, so.
• 3:55
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Raquel's going to be making no sense during the course of this.
• 4:01
  Nathan Wrigley: It's too early. But no, I really appreciate that. If you don't know Raquel, Raquel is the founder of Wonderland Curious, a tech event consultancy focused on creating innovative people-first experiences. Longtime leader in the WordPress ecosystem, she previously founded the WooCommerce agency Mode Effect, which she led for a decade before exiting in 2020.
• 4:23
  Nathan Wrigley: Today, she channels her community experience into PressConf, which we'll talk about in a minute, actually, a conference designed to foster candid, unrecorded conversations among the leaders. Shaping the WordPress Ecosystem. A perpetually curious soul, Raquel believes deeply in the power of meaningful connection wherever her feet land. Outside of work, she's a recent graduate of full-time parenthood. Do you call that graduation? It seemingly never ends for me. Parenthood and enjoys music.
• 4:53
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm still an undergrad, yeah. And she likes to spend time with her big indigenous family. We're going to show the website in a minute, but should you wish to see it, it is pressconf.events. You can go and check that out as well. So thank you, Raquel. I really appreciate it.
• 5:12
  Raquel: Thank you.
• 5:12
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, next we'll go to Rhys. Where is Rhys? Did I get that right?
• 5:18
  Raquel: Yeah, you are right. According to my screen, you are right.
• 5:22
  Nathan Wrigley: Rhys is also putting on an event. We'll find out about that in a minute. But Rhys is a freelance WordPress developer based in the northeast of England and has been working on WordPress for 20 plus years and feels Every single day of it, when he wakes up, he also is one of the co-organizers, here it comes, of the Manchester WordPress user group. No, that's not what I was expecting. And his day-to-day work focuses on custom development, performance optimization, and whatever else his clients throw at him.
• 5:50
  Nathan Wrigley: Away from WordPress, he plays cricket, makes and plays video games, and is slowly accumulating park-run venues.
• 5:58
  Raquel: You do loads of that. I'm trying to get to 50 by the end of the year. Saturday was 45th, so I should... I mean, unless I do something horrible, I should be able to get there.
• 6:17
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's pretty impressive. What I typically see on a Sunday morning, right, I open up the phone on my laptop or something, and I'm just getting up. And there's a picture of you having finished at a really difficult run, and I think I need to keep going.
• 6:32
  Raquel: I usually finish last. Like, there's not that many people who are... Who are slower than me, who don't walk it. Me and running, we're vowed enemies for life. I don't have it in me. I just don't have the stamina or anything like that.
• 6:50
  Nathan Wrigley: It's when you get an 80-year-old pushing their grandchildren around and overtaking you.
• 6:58
  Raquel: Yeah, okay. Yeah, this would be me.
• 7:02
  Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to read your URLs out. Professionally, Rhys is at dwinreece.com or reese.wales, which is a little bit easier.
• 7:12
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, here we go. Anyway, thank you for joining us, Rhys. Appreciate it. And finally, Steve Burge, who's gone to town with his bio. It's going to be a little bit lengthy, so take a deep breath.
• 7:23
  Steve Burge: Nathan, here we go. Publish Press founder.
• 7:26
  Steve Burge: I thought I would go back and fill in more later, but I just ran out of time.
• 7:29
  Nathan Wrigley: No, it's all right. It's good. He is, in fact, the founder of Publish Press, which we will also be talking about in a minute. But thank you, Steve, for joining us as well. Do you want to add anything before we kick it off?
• 7:40
  Steve Burge: Oh no, I had one of those kid graduating moments this morning. I woke up, they were about to go to high school, and in the US they leave for high school at like 6 in the morning. I'm British, normally high school would start 8 at a reasonable time. US high schools always start at unreasonable times. So this morning they were out there, their car wouldn't start. I was running around with jumper cables trying to get the battery started, trying to teach them how to.
• 8:09
  Nathan Wrigley: I remember that.
• 8:10
  Steve Burge: Yeah.
• 8:12
  Steve Burge: So, that's my reasoning for why it this morning was a little chaotic.
• 8:15
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, well, I appreciate you making it in. And appreciate these other people who dropped into the comments as well. So we've got Jackson saying ciao. Do you say that? Amici? Is that like friend or something like that? I don't know what that word means. Anyway, there we go. Hello, says Elliot from down the road for me. And we've got a clinking of beers. By that person, whoever that handle is. Um, Jaumatic, hello. Barcelona, we're from all over the...
• 8:44
  Steve Burge: Jaumatic. Mmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Maybe you're talking about your event already. Okay, yeah.
• 8:50
  Nathan Wrigley: Uh, everyone's here, awesome, says Nomad Skateboarding. Great to have the show back. Thanks, Elliot. Appreciate it. Webcammy, it's really... Yeah, well, you're even more on the coast than Raquelis, so it must be so brutal,
• 9:03
  Raquel: a clock where you are. It's the same time, but... Okay, all right, yeah.
• 9:08
  Nathan Wrigley: But she is hoster. If Raquel can do it, uh, Cammy, you can.
• 9:12
  Raquel: Um, and finally, Rhys, I love the raccoon Mario behind you. I know!
• 9:18
  Nathan Wrigley: You're very welcome, Courtney. I'm trying to point it. Yeah, we'll go. Yeah. You're very welcome, Courtney. Yay! I'll tell you about the story about getting it at some point, but we won't call the people
• 9:29
  Steve Burge: And then Steve says hello. Good afternoon.
• 9:30
  Nathan Wrigley: Hi Steve.
• 9:32
  Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, there we go. So if anything that we mention, if you want to just sort of, you know, interrupt us in the comments, that's great. Equally, if anybody on our panel wants to interrupt, please do. Otherwise, I just end up talking, which is no good for anybody. But the intention is for about, I don't know, 45 minutes or so, sorry, more like an hour and a quarter, something like that, bat around some things that have happened in the WordPress space. Because this show hasn't happened for quite a while, some of this might feel like it's happened a little while ago, maybe two or three weeks, and that's obviously because we haven't talked about it on the show before.
• 10:04
  Nathan Wrigley: But here's the website that we do, WPBuilds.com. If you want to keep up to date, just put your email address into there and we'll send you two emails a week. One for the podcast, which comes out on a Thursday and then for this episode as well. And here we go. Let's get stuck into it. So, The first piece is all about the roadmap for 7.2. This is featured on the repository. If you haven't signed up for the repository, please do so. It is, in my opinion, the best journalism that there is in the WordPress space these days, and Ray does a fantastic job of keeping us all up to date with all of, you know, like professional-grade journalism, basically, and she's talking in this particular case about WordPress 7.2, some new security features, suggestion mode for notes, and then there's a new default theme, perhaps, called Ipsom.
• 10:52
  Nathan Wrigley: Anne McCarthy, basically, has written a bunch of things about what's coming. Real-time editing, which has been something which has been punted again and again and again, and we've had like little bits nibbling away at real-time editing, it has again been punted for the third time, but this time long before the release, so in other words, it's not going in, we know it's not going in, whereas before it was going in and then it got sort of dragged out at the last minute.
• 11:20
  Nathan Wrigley: So that's not happening. However, there's going to be what's called a suggestion mode, which will be added, so it's a little bit like, I don't know, Google Docs commenting, where you can suggest something and that can then be ticked, and that edit can sort of take place. On a security footing, there's something called the Secrets API, which is really interesting, which would give WordPress a first-class way to store credentials, which we've never had before. That's kind of cool.
• 11:47
  Nathan Wrigley: And another thing called pseudo-mode, which I think is kind of curious, which is highly privileged admin access, but would need re-authentication at the point of view. So, hopefully, it wouldn't be something that could be abused, because pseudo-mode sounds like seriously dangerous.
• 12:04
  Nathan Wrigley: Application passwords are getting a bit of hardening as well.
• 12:09
  Nathan Wrigley: And also, responsive styling is set to get a public API so that you can do things programmatically, like set global styles. This, that, and the other thing. There's a bunch of other small fixes as well. But that's basically it. That's what I took from that. If anybody wants to comment on that, I will throw the doors open. So you can go for it or not, as the case may be.
• 12:32
  Nathan Wrigley: I think Steve had something to say, so that's why I'm going to hold on.
• 12:36
  Steve Burge: Yeah.
• 12:37
  Nathan Wrigley: Go ahead, Steve.
• 12:40
  Steve Burge: Oh, I was raising my hand, I guess.
• 12:42
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I'm sorry. So the way I run this show is because I've got my... Because I'm reading stuff on one screen, I often can't see the screen that we're in, so I probably won't see it. So just bot in, it's fine.
• 12:57
  Steve Burge: Thinking back, my original point was, I think you mentioned repository being like the best WordPress journalism. I don't think there's anything else like it in open source.
• 13:06
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, is that the case? Gosh.
• 13:07
  Steve Burge: I've got my feet in a few communities, in Drupal and Laravel and some others. I don't see anything of this quality. Anywhere else in the open source world, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I've missed it, but the bar, she's setting the bar, like, 100%. Yeah. Way, way high. I speak to Ray, not particularly often, but there was a period of time where I did speak to her quite a lot, and, man, she, like, for every hour that it takes, so let's say it takes you four minutes to read that thing that was just written, I reckon there's probably a full day, day and a half, two days, of solid work.
• 13:46
  Steve Burge: That's gone into that thing. It is not by accident. This doesn't trip off the tongue. Stuff like that is probably easy to track down, but when you're dealing with the conflict between Automatic and WP Engine, you have to read, like, pages and pages and pages of, like, court documents, and it's brutal, and she does it on our behalf, so go and sponsor her if you're not already, and read her stuff and shout from the rooftop. Sorry, Steve. Sorry, Karl.
• 14:14
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, now.
• 14:18
  Steve Burge: Oh, I don't know if he's frozen for you. And then the other... Yes.
• 14:24
  Steve Burge: There's...
• 14:26
  Steve Burge: Oh, am I freezing? Yes.
• 14:29
  Nathan Wrigley: You are a little bit. You might be better off, Steve, if you refresh and we'll drag you back in. In the meantime, I'll go to Rhys. Steve, if you just want to refresh, make sure that all the bits and pieces are aligned and then I'll go to Rhys and then we'll just drop you straight in when you get back. So, Rhys, over to you.
• 14:44
  Rhys Wynne: Okay. Things I like about this. I think the suggestion mode for notes, I just feel like is going to be, as a freelancer, this is very interesting for me. I get feedback from clients in every single form from Word documents to... I think I had one who actually printed something out and scribbled on me and sent me...
• 15:16
  Rhys Wynne: I'd ask for my postal address to go, here's a load of documents. So, to have something where... It's within the WordPress system, and this is where I would like the notes to go. Just a way that, whilst we can't get the real-time collaboration, which I think, in a way, is almost like a blessing in disguise, because for a suggestion, I'd probably be a client. It would just be like playing tennis.
• 15:49
  Rhys Wynne: Everything would come back and forth, and even when there's clients that send over Google Docs, there are times when I'm starting at the top, and they're just adding things to the bottom, and by the time they get to the bottom, they're at the top, and it's like, can we just have a day, please, so I can catch up? That's interesting.
• 16:10
  Rhys Wynne: I'm going to... I don't lament the loss of the 2020 themes, because I can't lament them, but I think it's probably sensible. They went for a default theme, which was the first one since Kubrick, if you remember that back in the past. That's got a name, that's got an actual name. Yeah, I do remember Kubrick, the big, blue, rounded banner at the top. Yeah, there's a few of the old sites I managed still have Kubrick installed.
• 16:40
  Rhys Wynne: Really? Yeah, and I... What are you managing over there? Oh, very, very old websites. Some of them have been going, I mean, one of them is my own. Oh, okay. I had, like, 2006, and it's just, again... Vintage. Yeah, yeah. Vintage websites, I like that. I'm also curious about the security mode as well. Yeah. Like, I want to... I apologize, I haven't really read too much into this, but having, like, a pseudo-mode for privileged users...
• 17:16
  Nathan Wrigley: I would be very interesting. Yeah, I'm sure that a developer like you probably would make use of that. I think the suggested bit where you get to say, yeah, let's do that. I'd be interested to see how far that stretches into WordPress. So for example, if it could stretch into, yeah, let's go with that font as the default font, or yeah, let's go with that color palette, as opposed to let's go with that paragraph in that post.
• 17:44
  Nathan Wrigley: It would be interesting if it stretches into the theming layer and things like that.
• 17:49
  Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, Steve, you've rejoined us. Any joy? Are you able to speak?
• 17:53
  Steve Burge: I hope so.
• 17:54
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we got you. We got you. Yeah, these things work inside the site editor.
• 17:57
  Steve Burge: You'll be able to leave notes when you're working on themes. Yeah.
• 18:03
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So do you want to carry on where you left off or, or have you, has that moment passed now?
• 18:09
  Steve Burge: Oh, you're making me constantly think back to like a few minutes. I guess collaborative editing. I've been on episodes of WP Builds before. We've talked about it and I said I think it's the most difficult thing people have ever tried to do in WordPress. And I think that's kind of proven true. It's got punted early. It's a long way from being even kind of attempted to be merged again.
• 18:40
  Steve Burge: They're working on something called the Presence API instead, I think. Yeah, we're going to come to that towards the end. So lock that one away. We'll come to the Presence API at the end. But yeah, given my use case for WordPress, which is usually just me. I would never make use of collaborative editing. I could imagine a team like TechCrunch or the BBC. I know BBC don't use WordPress, but I know TechCrunch do. A big team like that, I'm sure they could make use of it, but maybe where we're getting with these notes and comments and things like that, maybe that's as far as we probably need to go.
• 19:16
  Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, 7.2, just around the corner. You can go check it out in the repository. Raquel, anything on that, or should we press on?
• 19:24
  Raquel: I would love collaborative editing. That would work for my world.
• 19:28
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, would it? Okay. Yes, it just goes to show. We're all different, right? I'm always in WordPress by myself, but I guess if you're running events and things and you're trying to manage a team, having it all in one place.
• 19:41
  Rhys Wynne: It would. It would even, like, I'm a freelancer and my clients are quite small. Just, like, the time between, like, go to log into a post. Somebody else is in the post, emailing them to go, oh, you're already in the post, can I take over? They need to get coming back. Just things like that. It would just save so much time. But yeah, whether that's, would that be worth all the headaches that by the sounds of it, collaborative or other things seems to be, I don't know.
• 20:18
  Nathan Wrigley: So we have, we have a few comments. So Mr. Mr. Spollard, I'm guessing, or Mrs. Pollard, maybe. I don't know. It's got a capital S. Let's go with Mr. Spollard. Don't give clients pseudo. Okay. I won't do that. That makes sense. I get it. Steve needs to, Steve needs his jump leads. Oh, it is Mr. Pollard. No, Mr. S. Simon. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Sorry.
• 20:46
  Nathan Wrigley: Steve needs his jump leads from this morning. Okay. Hello, says Amber Hines. Hello, sir. It's Brian. Okay. That's Brian. Brian Richards. Thank you. Thank you. You see, I'm not very good with the handles. I know names, but I don't know handles. All the event organizers are here today. Yeah. Sorry, Steve, we've knocked out most of your face. Let me make that unhappen. There we go. So Jackson says, yeah, but the problem is, is the notes is in the admin on the editor page.
• 21:15
  Nathan Wrigley: We need to have notes available on the kind of front end login, just like every other feedback system if it's going to be used for clients.
• 21:26
  Nathan Wrigley: Simon Bollard says, agreed notes on the front end would be good. You can do that with third party services, but built in would be nice. And then I guess they're having a little bit of back and forth here. Most client feedback is before they would ever get access to the admin. And then Elliot, Elliot, Richard. Hello, Elliot. He agrees with Jackson. It would be nice to see notes brought to the front end where clients expect to mark things up on a live site. I feel that's a whole, we should do an episode just on this. Yeah.
• 21:53
  Nathan Wrigley: Another one, because it feels like there's a lot of people who've got comments. I mean, I agree with you. I mean, all of that, 100%, that's the way I'd like to see it go.
• 22:05
  Nathan Wrigley: Maybe it's like you send a client a URL that allows them to look at the page and, you know, by having this combination of a URL with like an encoded string or whatever, they can then maybe have like a, you know, a WordPress user level where it's a feedbacker. Commenter, you know, not a commenter in that sense of the word, but you know, oh, that's interesting. And that's the way I would potentially see it going.
• 22:38
  Steve Burge: Do you do something like that, Steve, with your published press suite? Do you have anything like Rhys has just described where you can have like something embedded in a string so that you become like a temporary day-long commenter on the structure of a site or something? No, we've been building fairly carefully around the notes feature because we've known it's been coming to the core. So we've added things like notifications when you get notes, but not features, because it's actually quite inspiring to see how many people are interested in this feature.
• 23:12
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's quite a few comments. There's a few more dropped in. So Amber Hines is saying, be careful about putting things into core that are not needed for the life cycle, for the life of a site. That's a good point. You basically want to pull that out the minute the site's gone live. Client review is really helpful during a new build but far less after launch. Good point. It feels like canonical plugin territory to me. Where did they go? Where did canonical plugins go? They sort of met an early grave at some point, didn't they? The groundwork for notes is a really positive feature. Building on that is always going to be a progression.
• 23:50
  Nathan Wrigley: And then Simon says yes to release when users are logged in, late to the party. So hello, Imran. We're going to talk about you, I think, later, Imran. Yeah, not about you, probably about the content of something you've got online, but, you know, it's definitely you that wrote it, I think. So anyway, there we go. There's the few bits and pieces that came out of that. So 7.2, let me just put that back on the page.
• 24:17
  Nathan Wrigley: Go and check it out on the repository. The piece is called WordPress 7.2 Roadmap includes new security features, suggestion mode for notes and Ipsum default theme. Keep the comments coming. It's lovely. Really nice. Right. Let's move on.
• 24:32
  Nathan Wrigley: This is just to say we're going to sort of segue into events for maybe 20 minutes or so, because two of the people on the panel have got an event coming up and we want to hear all about it. So we'll just segue gently into that subject. This is just to say that again, In the past few releases of WordPress, for like a couple of years, there's been this effort to try and do a live event where somebody pushes a big red bottom and a version of WordPress is released. Nice idea, really nice idea, but it turned out to be really difficult to pull off.
• 25:07
  Nathan Wrigley: So it's things like how do you ensure that the people that have, you know, been part of that release are in the room to make them feel valued as a part of that? How do you actually make sure that, you know, the event actually happens at the right time for the release and, you know, so that if the release comes out two weeks later, it doesn't feel like a damn squib. Anyway, that whole thing has now gone away. What's going to happen now is it's going to be a kind of Zoom event. So there will be some kind of live event, but it won't be in person.
• 25:36
  Raquel: Good idea. Good gimmick, I guess, would be the way to describe that, but it didn't really pan out as expected. So, I don't suppose any of you have got anything to say about that. If you do, say it and I'll wait. But if not, I'll move on. It's a bummer. I got to be backstage and work in U.S. while this was supposed to happen. So yeah, I got to see the difficulty of making it happen live. But I personally love the idea, so it's a bummer.
• 26:04
  Raquel: Yeah. So what was the difficult stuff that was going? Is it just like making sure that everybody's actually there and they know what to do at the right time?
• 26:13
  Nathan Wrigley: And remembering, you know, from the top down, you know, making sure that everyone knows, like, this is what we're doing, right? And then you get up on stage and then all of a sudden you realize, oh, wait, I think they forgot. Okay. Yeah. Just a little bit of human, human error, really. Yeah. There was that big red button, wasn't there, at WordCamp USA? And you're right. It kind of, like, got lost amongst all the other bits and pieces. And then, I could be wrong, Raquel, it felt to me like when Anne finally did, Anne McCarthy, when she did finally hit the button, it felt like there was supposed to be a sound effect. And the sound effect, like...
• 26:48
  Steve Burge: It was about 15 seconds after she hit the button or something like that. Yeah. It was definitely not according to the plan. Yeah. The timing of it. It's a good idea. It's a good idea. I've got a memory of maybe when Gutenberg dropped for the first time. They did it kind of during WordCamp US, maybe in Philadelphia, I want to say. Okay. And I remember everyone scrambling suddenly.
• 27:17
  Steve Burge: The new version of WordPress went live and suddenly bunches of people were having to spend their conference in hotel rooms dealing with broken client sites.
• 27:27
  Nathan Wrigley: It was not. No, because I think he announced it 2018, right, which that was Nashville. Yeah. And then. Yeah. It might have been St. Louis when it actually, or maybe Nashville when it went live. Yeah. It was a good idea, though. I like the idea of gimmicks. I think we need, honestly, like this is going to sound really shallow and a bit silly, but I think we need gimmicks. Like loads of gimmicks. I genuinely don't know what that means, but I just love the stupid stuff, the silly gimmicks.
• 28:00
  Raquel: I do too. I love silly. Yeah, yeah. She says leaning into the accent. Very good. That's it.
• 28:10
  Nathan Wrigley: But I think loads of silly stuff like that is really good. I think Nick Hamsey is doing a load of, air quotes, silly stuff in the WordPress space and it's got my attention every time. It's brilliant. Yeah. Anyway, so here we go. Gutenberg says, Courtney, that was Gutenberg's infamous launch. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Let's move on. Let's move on. So speaking of events, Raquel is like, I want to say this is the third iteration of PressConf. I could be wrong about that.
• 28:44
  Nathan Wrigley: But I've just put on the screen word, sorry, PressConf.events, Barcelona, 2026. Tell us more, Raquel. I'll just leave it open like that, if that's all right. So…
• 28:57
  Raquel: Yeah, this is the expanded version of Press Comp. And I wasn't thinking it would come to Europe this year. I was thinking next year. But the beginning of this year, I just had this feeling inside of me. I'm like, it's got to go. It's got to go now. So, here we are. It's just like Press Comp. It doesn't look like anyone here has been. But in the comments, Kami has been, Steve, Woody, and a lot of the team is here. There's Ana and Jauma and Brian Richards in there.
• 29:33
  Raquel: Yeah. Yeah. But it is like, it is truly, yes, it's for anybody who makes money on WordPress. And that is the target. It really would love to see more and more agencies come out. I get it. It's hard for agencies to come because, you know, all of our time is billable or not. But it's really, truly a gathering of minds. People who can be in the trenches together because we're in this WordPress world trying to make money, trying to make our businesses last.
• 30:03
  Raquel: The talks are like TED Talks, so they go deep. They go really deep. It's not a how-to. You're not going to go learn how-to business. You're going to go get your cup filled from the inside. That's my favorite part about it. Not to reveal too much. We don't record the sessions. I think sometimes people misunderstand why we don't. We really don't because we want the speakers to just let it all out. We want them to be raw, vulnerable, and to share numbers, to share a lot of things that maybe they wouldn't necessarily share.
• 30:38
  Raquel: There's that little bit of you don't mind sharing with people one-on-one, but you wouldn't necessarily go tweet it out. That's the idea behind it. Honestly, I'm going to say adjectives. It's a sweet time of like-minded business owners who are just
• 30:59
  Raquel: trying to make this happen and work. So
• 31:02
  Raquel: Yes, Barcelona, or I have to do it with the Catalan, Barcelona. I know I'm like, I'm half Mexican, so I'm like, oh, getting that Lisbon is hard for me. But I'm really looking forward to it. Everybody loves Spain. So, and then coincidentally, yes, WordCamp Europe is in Spain. But that's me. Very, very Indian. So there's lots of time.
• 31:26
  Steve Burge: Yeah. Raquel, I've got a practical question. How are you organizing the event from the western side of the US? So you've got a team member in Barcelona, or how?
• 31:40
  Raquel: Yeah. Jama, he's here in comments. So that was kind of new. I've just been doing it. I was in the UK all summer, and so I actually did go do a site visit in Barcelona. And yeah, it's just not been necessarily the easiest, but now that Jama is on the team, that's really helped a lot. So I would say...
• 32:01
  Nathan Wrigley: That has been the biggest game-changer, is having a local there. That's how. So, can I ask why, so firstly, why Spain and Barcelona in particular? Is that like a, is that a you thing? Did you fancy that personally or was that, I don't know, just something that the community said?
• 32:18
  Raquel: Do you know what, if you had to go in Europe, Barcelona feels like a good story. Yeah. Yeah, well, I think it was also the time of year because it's at the end of October. So, at that point, I actually considered the UK, but weather could have not been great.
• 32:34
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh. Wisely avoided, I'd say. Attendance numbers, one.
• 32:42
  Raquel: Yeah. Yeah. So, that was part of it. And, you know, you have your advisors and there was a lot of, my European advisors were like, you got to be in South Europe at that time of year. You got to be in South Europe at that time of year. So, I was like, okay. And, and I do love Spain. So, I kind of settled from that point. I was either Barcelona, Madrid, or like Lisbon, somewhere in Portugal, or even Porto. And just out of, oh my gosh, like 25 hotels I was reaching out to, this one made the cut. And it seemed like the most reasonable, because some of them were just, like, the quotes they were giving me at the beginning, I'm like, what?
• 33:23
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
• 33:24
  Raquel: Yeah. Yeah. So that's why.
• 33:27
  Nathan Wrigley: So it all takes place in the one building, does it? So is everybody encouraged to sort of stay, I'm going to use the words, on site, if you know what I mean? Is that the plan?
• 33:36
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
• 33:36
  Nathan Wrigley: It's like a little campus for a few days?
• 33:39
  Raquel: Yeah. No, it is. It's, the whole event is arranged around everyone being there together. And that is what we get feedback all the time that people love so much, is that, you know, you, yes, you can, like a WordCamp, you know, a lot of us are all over the place, but we have, like, our kind of central hangouts. And then... We're Kemp US is more so this way where there's usually an official hotel and so even if you're not staying at the official hotel you're all hanging out in the lobby at the end well and so this one it the idea is that like everyone can be there in the hotel together so when you get up you're doing breakfast with each other when you are going to the sessions and you're hanging out you're together at night when you're walking around you're together and even if you don't want to be together you kind of can't escape each other yeah run into each other yeah yeah that's nice.
• 34:27
  Nathan Wrigley: And that's what people like actually yeah. Barcelona is super well connected as well in terms of so like affordable flights from the UK. Barcelona is one of those ones that ticks the box for affordable you know it's really cheap from where I am at least anyway I expect in the rest of the UK it's the same I don't know about the rest of Europe but it's like really really affordable compared to a lot of other destinations.
• 34:50
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah I saw like a Ryanair 25 euro from UK to that kind of level not yeah I believe and again I don't quote me on this I believe it's a hub for southern Europe okay so like my Amsterdam and Heathrow are for right okay Barcelona.
• 35:10
  Nathan Wrigley: You know later?
• 35:12
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that makes sense. Even I could get there pretty easily. I can't do a straight shot from Phoenix to Barcelona, but I could do Phoenix to, whatever, Atlanta.
• 35:22
  Nathan Wrigley: And then, yeah, the next step.
• 35:23
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. So, a few comments about that. But first of all, we should probably just sort of save the date. So, it's actually happening later this month.
• 35:31
  Nathan Wrigley: Yep.
• 35:31
  Nathan Wrigley: If you're free between the 27th or the 30th to the 30th of October, that's when it's going to be. The URL is pressconf, so P-R-E-S-S-C-O-N-F dot events, plural dot events. Go and check it out. Tickets available still, I'm guessing. There's a purple button on the website there. You still got some seats?
• 35:57
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
• 35:58
  Nathan Wrigley: Tickets are available. If you're going in a team, take advantage of the squad goals pricing because it is a significant discount.
• 36:05
  Nathan Wrigley: DM me if you have any questions.
• 36:08
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, three or more. It is a significant discount.
• 36:12
  Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, there's lots of ways. And it is my business. I know I've been DM'd and people compare it to WordCamp. It really is not comparable to WordCamp because WordCamps are ran by WPCS. And so this is Wonderland Curious that runs this event. So nobody's getting rich, but we definitely have expenses. So that's the reason why things are priced at what they are. But it really does.
• 36:38
  Nathan Wrigley: I mean, if you talk to people, it's a very different, very worthwhile event.
• 36:44
  Nathan Wrigley: I've lost count of the comments now. There's quite a lot going on about here. Wow, there really is. I haven't looked for the last couple of minutes, so let's see if we can pick a few off. It's an amazing conference. Everyone should go, says Cammie. That's nice. Let me just take that screen away so we can see the comments fully.
• 37:04
  Nathan Wrigley: Steve says, it was the first time I saw the WordPress community rather than software. That's nice too, isn't it? Steve says, just wondering if a video marketer will it be useful for me? So that's a question for you, I guess, Raquel.
• 37:19
  Nathan Wrigley: Raquel Johnson- Yeah, so Christian, now Makoa, was Christian Taylor. Him and Mark Zemanski came. It really, for what they told me, it was like... Getting a fast track into going deep with the community, because that is the hard part with video marketing, especially from the YouTube side, because there's that little bit of a bridge of getting to be in the trenches with the community, so this is a really good opportunity to jump into the deep end, because these end up being the leaders of WordPress, like the who's who of the community, end up coming up, showing up, so then you're rubbing shoulders with people who you really want to get to know.
• 38:01
  Nathan Wrigley: Imran, sold. Look, I mean, he's that close, Raquel. He's almost booked the flights about five times this week, but each time I pause, grab a Pepsi Max and then close it down. It would be nice, Imran, if we got to the end of this episode and, you know, just saying.
• 38:18
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, reach out, Imran. We'll see what we can do to push you over in a good way. Yeah, that's nice. Simon wants to go. He says, will somebody pay for him to go? That'd be nice. And then...
• 38:33
  Nathan Wrigley: Who is this again?
• 38:35
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Brian. Brian answered.
• 38:37
  Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, Brian. Sorry, I don't know your handle, so apologies. So you've answered that question. That's great.
• 38:44
  Nathan Wrigley: LoopConf. Brian is LoopConf. That's right. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I actually went to LoopConf last year, so I don't know Brian. I've seen Brian, but I've met him for like three minutes, I think, one time. What else have we got? Barcelona is the best city for skateboarding. Okay.
• 38:59
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, of course, no mad skateboarding. Every week he shows up.
• 39:03
  Nathan Wrigley: But there's dog poop everywhere. That's my only complaint is that they don't clean up after their doggies. Oh, really?
• 39:09
  Nathan Wrigley: They do not. Everywhere.
• 39:12
  Nathan Wrigley: You don't want dog poop on your skates, that's for sure.
• 39:16
  Nathan Wrigley: As a video marketer, Steve says, maybe not for content, but for connections, 100%. There we go.
• 39:22
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, really, for content, too, you could do a whole lot. In fact, we allow recording just not once a speaker hits the podium. Okay, so you can use the event venue for recording. Yes, all of it.
• 39:37
  Nathan Wrigley: Marcus Burnett, he says he's coming in late, but nice the show is back. Thank you. We're glad that it's back as well. And then there's a few comments. Flight from the UK. 25 quid!
• 39:49
  Nathan Wrigley: That's insane. It costs me more to go to York on the train, and that's like 40 minutes away. That's absolutely insane. Yeah, that's so weird to me. Trains are sometimes more expensive than flights. It's so weird.
• 40:03
  Nathan Wrigley: I've not lived in England for like 20 years, but it seems like it's now like 500 pounds to go from London to Birmingham on a train. Oh, but yeah, it's 10 bucks. 10 quid to fly to Barcelona. Yeah, there are there are stories at least one a year and it'll be like somebody wants to meet his friend in Newcastle and rather than go to Newcastle from London, they'll fly to.
• 40:32
  Nathan Wrigley: And it's probably quicker as well if you go in for the day.
• 40:37
  Nathan Wrigley: So there's lots of conversation about like the price of flights and things like that. So thank you for that. And then you are alive, Nathan. I am. I have been alive all this time. I've just not been making video content, which has been quite nice for the SaaS app, which I should mention at some point, actually. Gaudi architecture, of course, very famous. They've just finished it. The Sagrada Familia has just finished. Sagrada Familia. But according to JAMA, there's still a little bit that they're working on still.
• 41:06
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, really? Oh, it's going to be like that. But at least the cranes are gone.
• 41:10
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Lots of comments about flights and...
• 41:16
  Nathan Wrigley: Nine of cats in Catalonia. That's my only gripe. Okay. Bye. Me too! I agree. I'm a cat girl, so I agree with that.
• 41:28
  Nathan Wrigley: And then if flights in Barcelona Airport are too expensive, maybe go Girona. Oh, so alternatives. That's interesting.
• 41:35
  Nathan Wrigley: You go via Girona, one hour drive from Barcelona, so you rent a car or something like that, especially from the UK. Wow. Right, let's put the website back up. There it is. Pressconf.events happening in a couple of weeks. That's an exaggeration. It's more like three weeks, but it's very soon anyway, so go check it out.
• 41:55
  Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for sharing. Yeah.
• 41:58
  Nathan Wrigley: I was right. It's not soon. It's soon.
• 42:02
  Nathan Wrigley: It's really soon. Yeah, it's really right.
• 42:04
  Nathan Wrigley: The Organizing Committee, it's soon. Yeah. Speaking of Organizing Committee, one of our other guests, Mr. Reece Wynn, is also organizing something in the WordPress space. It is this.
• 42:17
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
• 42:20
  Nathan Wrigley: Camp Manchester 2026, so a little bit later, just like it's still not that far away, it's really soon. This is on a very different, like there's a chalk and cheese kind of events in these though, aren't they? So, for a start, it's in Manchester in November, so you know, take that. There won't be any sitting by the beach or any of the other stuff, but tell us what's going on. This is great. I'm so pleased you've done this. Thank you. Tell us.
• 42:49
  Nathan Wrigley: I have been to WordCamps in Europe. I've been to PressConf, not PressConf, I went to LeapConf last year, and the amount of people who said, we need a WordCamp back in the UK, it has always been a bit of a stumbling block, based on effort and based on, you know, cost and getting it off the ground.
• 43:16
  Nathan Wrigley: Defined, we have found a way... Amy to run one in Manchester. It's a co-working space. We discovered it purely by accident. Somebody was walking around the co-working space because they were using it for their wedding, which is the week after, which is why we're not clashing with press comp as well.
• 43:44
  Nathan Wrigley: But yeah, they were coming around and they said, oh, we can rent this venue. Cool. Sent a few emails out and we have put together a WordCamp. It's very different. If you've been to a WordCamp before, this is not going to be like it.
• 44:08
  Nathan Wrigley: Why is that? What's the difference?
• 44:11
  Nathan Wrigley: We are a BarCamp. There is one keynote. No. Event. It's not a speaker. It's an event. And that's it.
• 44:25
  Nathan Wrigley: Right. So it's more of a gathering.
• 44:27
  Nathan Wrigley: It's more of a gathering.
• 44:28
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
• 44:29
  Nathan Wrigley: And it will be in a bar camp format. So the idea is, is that on the day, I and the organizing team are just facilitating what, you know, we just say, what do you want to talk about? Like the last session before lunch is... What do you want to talk about? What do you want to talk about? Okay. And the idea is, is the afternoon session is going to be just people going off into groups and talking about it.
• 45:01
  Nathan Wrigley: We have done it in a way that we don't even have, we have to have the global sponsors.
• 45:10
  Nathan Wrigley: We're all, we don't have sponsors. Like we have micro sponsors, which is a little bit more expensive ticket. Okay. So, these wonderful people that Nathan's got on the screen and companies have paid more for tickets, and yeah, it's very much just come along in a, the only thing we're going to promise, and there is a lot of this because I'm like the lead organiser of the three people who are organising it, Steve, who is sometimes, who was in the company, as long as before, Steve Mosby also talked about it, was, is one of the co-organisers. All we're facilitating is come for a conversation, come to meet people, come and discuss, and let's see what comes out of it.
• 46:06
  Nathan Wrigley: So, firstly, thank you for putting it on. And actually, there's a few people who are congratulating you on that score. So, Simon.
• 46:14
  Nathan Wrigley: Yes, Rhys, thank you and the team for doing this. Nathan and I were talking about all the WordCamps etc the other month. Yes, we were. And also Dave Den, who attends WPLDN in London, WordCamp back in the UK. He's obviously heavily involved in Accessibility Day as well. Yeah. And Courtney, back to the roots where WordCamps began. Yeah, so it's a show up, see what happens, social event as much as anything else and just let's just hang out and chat sort of thing.
• 46:46
  Nathan Wrigley: I think I'll be joining you for the BarCamp. Mecha Mozilla. Okay, thank you. Yeah, that was easy for you to say, but not me apparently. Thank you. It's Jake from Play Expo. Yeah, I was at an event at the weekend and Jake was there and we ended up talking about nothing to do with WordPress. We found out we work in exactly the same field, which is lovely.
• 47:13
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's nice, yeah. More or less every time I do one of these episodes, this... Person shows up. Gevenk. Every week, I could never remember their name. I'm so sorry. I have the memory of a goldfish, a really forgetful goldfish. Anyway, Gevenk, your name escaped me again. I'm really sorry. But he says he loves the idea of a bar camp, WordCamp. You can come, Manchester. Look, there's the date, 6th November 2026. Come along, grab a coffee, says Steve Mosley or a tea, and chat about WordPress in the community.
• 47:48
  Nathan Wrigley: And then we've got the, you know, the guaranteed spam comment from Twitter, which we get every week as well. There it is. I'm not going to read it out. And I also love the style of the website. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, it's, Rhys, pardon my ignorance. What is the, what is the graphic design for the site coming from? Uh, well, it was originally done for her by, uh, uh, Tammy Lister. Um, she, she knocked it together amazingly, uh, within about...
• 48:18
  Nathan Wrigley: I mean, just incredible what she does. Because he's so perfectly 8-bit. Yeah, he's so perfectly 8-bit.
• 48:27
  Nathan Wrigley: It was decided, because I quite like video games, as you can probably tell, like one of the other co-organizers say, if Reese is the WordCamp organizer, we've got to do it in that style. The only person who doesn't seem to be carrying on with that style is myself, purely because I just stick in band references in the posts.
• 48:54
  Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, the 24-hour WordCamp people is a reference to 24-hour party people and things like that. But everybody else, we've got a post coming out also kind of explaining about the computer history in Manchester. It was where Alan Turing... Came on board, but also there was a lot of video game developers in the Micro 8-Bits based in Manchester. Ocean Software was quite a big one.
• 49:27
  Nathan Wrigley: Rhys, what is the Alright Our Kid? Is that a Britishism? Yeah, so Alright Our Kid is a way to say hello, basically. You alright Our Kid? Yeah, because I do know that you're right, because everybody's like, you're right. And I'm like, yeah, I'm okay. And then I realized that's just how you guys say hi. But I haven't heard that Our Kid added to it. That's for Manchester. So you just bolted on to the end, don't you? And it basically means, it's like more, how to describe it? It's like more, we're more friends than if you just say, you're alright?
• 50:01
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. There's some depth to your relationship. You're alright, Our Kid? Kind of thing. I guess a bit more to it. It is so funny as an American to hear somebody be like, you're right. And you're like, yeah, you think something's wrong. Oh, that's interesting, because that's such a, that's basically hello. You know, it has no more. I know that now. The first time hearing that, I'm like, what do you mean? Am I all right? Of course I'm not right. And can I just say, Courtney spotted it. Mike Little, co-founder of WordPress, is a micro-sponsor. That's very cool.
• 50:33
  Nathan Wrigley: Is he still Manchester Way? He's still Manchester Way for various reasons. He tends to not come to events as much as he used to. But hopefully he will be. But he's supporting, which is wonderful.
• 50:54
  Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Okay, so there you've got two events. There's a third event that we should mention. And Amber Hines correctly spots the next thing that's coming up, which is to say WordPress Accessibility Day. So I'll just pop the screen off because that's actually happening. That's the soonest of everything really.
• 51:11
  Nathan Wrigley: So there we go. Amber's in the comments. If you have any questions about WordPress Accessibility Day. So is Davin, actually. Davedon. It's also in the comments if you've got any questions about that. But here it is. So this is happening. I think it's this week. Please, if anybody can see the dates before me. Our events. I'm so sorry. Oh, yeah, there we go.
• 51:37
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, right at the top. 7th. So basically starting on Wednesday, WordPress, the WP Accessibility Day. This is an online event. It's been going for many, many years. It, you know, I mean, I don't need to tell you what it's about, but it is obviously about WordPress and other accessibility and talks by many, the great and the good in the accessibility space, put it that way. So if you've got anything that you would you'd like to check out, you can go and look at this. The URL is really great.
• 52:05
  Nathan Wrigley: It's WP Accessibility dot day. So dead easy to remember. And like I said, it's coming up on Wednesday. You can register now by clicking on this link. And if you want to hear more, you can drop your email into the little box there.
• 52:22
  Nathan Wrigley: Amber did reach out, and we were going to do a podcast episode, but then we realized that my kind of holiday period didn't coincide well, so it would never have landed as an episode before the actual event. So, sorry about that, Amber. It just never quite worked out, did it? But, okay. Right, here we go again. Mayank, it's a great idea to revive WordCamps. It's becoming hard to maintain it for years, at least from what I'm seeing across the world. More cities are getting added, and old WordCamps are dying.
• 52:53
  Nathan Wrigley: I like Rhys's idea, if you're going to do a WordCamp though, because I'm guessing that the burden on Rhys is significantly less than if you were doing a normal WordCamp with speakers and all that, so that's really interesting.
• 53:05
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, it's, the burden is, as somebody who has done like the more traditional stand, you know, organizing of WordPress, I couldn't organize a, you know, a standard one, really time-wise. But yeah, this is, this is a very, very low.
• 53:29
  Nathan Wrigley: Light touch, low organising. Like for example, I'll just talk about, we're not doing a lunch, like we're just saying... B.Y.O. Bring your own lunch.
• 53:42
  Nathan Wrigley: Don't bring your own lunch, because there's a cafe on site. Don't bring your own lunch, get your lunch from the cafe. At the very least there's a lunch from the cafe, the Tesco, you can get a meal deal, but there will be, I think this is...
• 54:01
  Nathan Wrigley: B.Y.O. That we're doing a Lunch with Future Friends event, where somebody is going to be a...
• 54:18
  Nathan Wrigley: Show up. And, you know, you can come and have a natter. It'll probably be in the cafe next door, to be perfectly honest. And then we get into all the Mancunian stuff. Look, Elliot's leaning in. Cup of tea, our kid. And then press forward, normally followed by a, do you want a brew? That's true. That is true. Yeah. Want a brew is a cup of tea. In case Raquel was wondering, I'm sure we figured that out.
• 54:45
  Nathan Wrigley: Yes, I know that now.
• 54:49
  Nathan Wrigley: Raquel's threatened to do loads of her English accent. And she's only given us one example of that so far. So we're hoping that that's good. Well, I always tell, I always say at the beginning, I'm like, I promise not taking the piss out of you. I'll start speaking like this. Because Brits think that I'm doing that, like that when Americans speak with the British, that we're making fun. And I'm like, no, I love it. Do you do varied English accents or British accents? All over. You do that one or you do others as well. Because we've got so many accents, considering how big the country is.
• 55:17
  Nathan Wrigley: So many. And some of them are just incomprehensible to me. Like, I spent some time in Newcastle this weekend and I really genuinely did have to say, I'm sorry, you're gonna have to say that again, I'm really sorry to quite a few people. You drive 30 miles and the name for a bread roll has changed four times. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you can tell where you are by asking what the bread is called. Cockney is the impersonation. Everyone can do a Cockney and then you go up and maybe the welts might be the hardest and there's levels to this.
• 55:50
  Nathan Wrigley: There is lots of levels to it. So, Simon, on the back of this conversation, maybe he's already thinking about it, but he's thinking of doing the same thing in Bristol. Have a recollection that that was something he was going to do. If, Simon, and I know, I know you, if you just want to reach out and just ask questions, I'm happy to talk off the record on... Things we've found out. Okay. It's great. I love this show for this. This is the best bit about this show is all these interconnecting bits.
• 56:19
  Nathan Wrigley: So many interesting serendipitous things happened because of meeting as guests. So the three of you were on this show and so many interesting things have happened that I found out about when after people had met on this show. And I think that's absolutely lovely. Like the like the South in America. Okay. Philly says. Yeah. So Seth. Cajun. He can't understand Louisiana people in the South when he's in the South of America.
• 56:46
  Nathan Wrigley: And then he's given us some examples. Listen, we really should get back to some word resolution. We've totally gone off the rails, which is great. I love it. But here we go. So let's go back. And in this case, let's talk about Steve's podcast. Steve has published press, which is a suite of. Plugins which enable you to do a whole load of extra stuff around workflows in publishing things on your WordPress site.
• 57:11
  Nathan Wrigley: But this week on the podcast you had Jason Cohen. I don't know if you've been following this, Jason Cohen has been producing a podcast for not that long and it's really great. We listened to, so Dan and I who've been working on this show.fm app, Dan and I listened to one that he did a few weeks ago in the podcasting space and then he did one with Carl, Carl from EMEA, I don't know if anybody saw that one, and then to flip it round, instead of him doing the podcast, Steve you had him on your podcast. What did you talk about? What was going on there?
• 57:51
  Nathan Wrigley: We did a book. But he's got a, he's been writing for years. He's kind of writes, like... Like... If you've come across Paul Graham, who is a British guy, lives in Silicon Valley, he tends to blog in full-length essays which are carefully thought out, and Jason's been doing that for years, and he's turned a lot of it into a book.
• 58:18
  Nathan Wrigley: So I had him on the podcast to talk about the book, but yeah, he's spun out his own podcast too, which has an interesting twist in that it's much more confrontational, I would say.
• 58:34
  Nathan Wrigley: Like the episode with Carl. He's like, Carl, you're failing. You're doing badly. This is not working. Let's kind of give you a very polite...
• 58:48
  Nathan Wrigley: ...wake up slap and let's see if you can do better. Did you see Carl's email after that episode? So, Carl has an app called, like, it's this really technical thing. I'm not even going to try and describe it, but he's got this incredibly technical product called EMIR, Y-M-I-R. And I think his attention has been fairly shattered, trying to get it out amongst all the other myriad different things that he does, and it's kind of flatlined.
• 59:16
  Nathan Wrigley: He went on that podcast, just being on that podcast. Jason's obviously got a big, you know, following. You see the line of his podcast and, you know, and then it just goes, boom! It just goes right off.
• 59:32
  Nathan Wrigley: And it was merely, as far as I can work out, it was merely the appearance on the podcast. There was a bunch of people who he could never reach who totally got what he was building. So, whatever Jason said, and however Carl responded, it really resonated with a bunch of people. So, I'm really happy for Carl out of that. Anyway, I'm so sorry I interrupted. You were saying. Oh, no, no. So, Jason has a book out, and there's the podcast, too, and the podcast.
• 59:58
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Normally, a lot of these podcasts are just people BSing back and forth, like happy questions. Oh, you're doing so well. You're doing so great. Congrats on this. Congrats on that.
• 1:00:13
  Nathan Wrigley: And Jason's podcast is the opposite. It's like, okay, you're failing. This isn't working. Your business growth is stuck. Your business is declining. XYZ problem is happening. And he asks tough questions. And often the answer from the person on the other end of the podcast is, uh, I don't know. Yeah, I love it. It's kind of interesting seeing actually the reaction to that because I've watched a couple of the episodes and it was clear that some some people their personality type gets in the way of that in that they they see that as a bit of an assault, whereas other people a bit like, yeah, yeah, I don't know the answer to that.
• 1:00:53
  Nathan Wrigley: That's not good, is it? You know, it really does depend on how you. How you frame your own response to that, what you're going to get out of it, because it did feel like a bit of an assault, and the Brit in me was kind of watching it through my fictions, like, it's really hard to watch, because they're getting a pounding. It's a bit like watching Dragon's Den or what's it called, Shark Tank in the US or something, you know, but it's very effective, you know, and he is a serial successful entrepreneur, isn't he?
• 1:01:24
  Nathan Wrigley: So, he's not sort of like speaking from a place of emptiness. He definitely knows what he's talking about. So, yeah, I only have one thing to say, Steve, and that is on your website here. It is, I think I've got an idea of how we could improve this podcast player. I've got this. We've got to this point in the podcast, and we haven't mentioned the thing you've been working on for like three years, and I'm just too shy, I'm too shy. We'll do that. Maybe we'll squeeze that in at the end or something.
• 1:01:54
  Nathan Wrigley: You need to go on Jason's podcast, and he'll give you a.
• 1:01:59
  Nathan Wrigley: Roasting. You should be mentioning short film at any point. Absolutely pasted. Yeah, you're absolutely right. OK, so anyway, if you want to hear Jason from WP Engine, amongst other places, I've forgotten what the other one's called. Is it Tiny something or other? He's got another product. I've forgotten what it is. Anyway, serial entrepreneur and Steve spoke to him in depth on the published press podcast.
• 1:02:26
  Nathan Wrigley: So go and check that out. And then we've got some inevitable comments about how you might order things in the UK.
• 1:02:33
  Nathan Wrigley: Down here in the Cotswolds, we can order a Henry at the bar. I have no idea what that would get you. No, no idea. I mean, is that going to be a pint or a pizza? Maybe it's a pizza. A Henry. Yeah, if you ordered that here, everybody's going to go, no. You want a vacuum cleaner? I don't know. I don't know what that is.
• 1:02:53
  Nathan Wrigley: Tell us. But that was our misery earlier. Yeah. Okay, moving on. Anne McCarthy's auctioning things. Turns out that if you are somebody, I don't know what level of contribution you have to do in a release, but if you are significant, let's go with that, in a release lead capacity or something like that, of a WordPress point release, then you get sent a record like Anne McCarthy has done over many, many years.
• 1:03:20
  Nathan Wrigley: So she's received from Matt Mullenweg a record like that. So it comes in a frame, you get the record, you get the album, it's all behind glass. And I guess the idea is you stick it on the wall. Anne, however, had a different intuition. She put them in a cupboard where they've remained gathering dust for several years. But instead of them being thrown into a skip, she's decided to auction them off for a good cause. And so you can find out more about that.
• 1:03:47
  Nathan Wrigley: I'm looking at the repository website, but also in tomorrow's show notes, I'll link to releaseauction.blog. She got a domain for it, which is really great. And she's auctioning them off. So if you want to get a little bit of history in the WordPress space, you can go and bid and take these off Anne's hands. And she's not trying to create the money for herself. She's doing it for an organization I had never heard of before.
• 1:04:13
  Nathan Wrigley: It's called Stimpunk. I think I'm probably saying that correctly. S-C-I-M-P-U-N-K-S. Stimpunks.
• 1:04:21
  Nathan Wrigley: And they are in the business of support. Well, I say business. I'm guessing it's a nonprofit or a charity supporting neurodivergent and disabled people through mutual aid, micro grants and openly shared resources.
• 1:04:35
  Nathan Wrigley: So, it looks like this.
• 1:04:37
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it is, isn't it?
• 1:04:38
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, clever. Because, well, Stimpunk, because, like, neurodivergents tend to stim.
• 1:04:44
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh.
• 1:04:49
  Nathan Wrigley: That's clever.
• 1:04:52
  Nathan Wrigley: My understanding was Ryan Boren, who contributed quite a lot in the early days of WordPress, set up Stimpunk. So yeah, this is great. Like you, I never knew. I believe sometimes of this parish, Michelle Frechette, she's got one, but I couldn't be wrong. So I don't think, I'm not entirely sure if it's like lead organizer or a bunch of...
• 1:05:22
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, maybe you were leading a particular team or something like that. Here you can see Anne, she's got quite a few, look. And you don't actually get to keep Anne, by the way. You're not actually bidding for Anne. You're just going to get the record. But I love that. Look at the different pictures. Didn't know what to do with herself with this one. Well done, Anne.
• 1:05:42
  Nathan Wrigley: But she seems to have gotten bored by the... Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
• 1:05:46
  Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah.
• 1:05:49
  Nathan Wrigley: But seriously, that's a cool thing to have. I mean, genuinely, I think that's a really nice bit of memorabilia. And obviously, if you're into WordPress, that's a significant thing we could still work here. And Anne is one of the nicest people in the WordPress world.
• 1:06:03
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, she is. We were saying that earlier, yeah. She really is. She's a lovely human being.
• 1:06:09
  Nathan Wrigley: I was lucky enough to spend quite a little bit of time with her in Phoenix just that recently. And always a pleasure. So Stimpunks is awesome.
• 1:06:20
  Nathan Wrigley: OK, we'll get to the drink in a minute. So Henry is a drink, by the way. Stimpunks was founded by, co-founded by Boron, one of the earliest WP committers, core committers, people with keys to merge code that gets released, was rather active before I braved my way into code before Slack. Yeah, I think he kind of almost hand wrote a lot of the key features that are in WordPress now. Could could have been things like the plug in architecture and hooks and things like that.
• 1:06:47
  Nathan Wrigley: Not entirely sure. But OK, I'm going to put you out of your misery. A Henry is.
• 1:06:53
  Nathan Wrigley: It's orange juice and lemonade half and half. There you go. Now you know. So you can go and order. I don't know what the geographical limits are when you order that. Like, maybe it's like within half a mile of Elliot's house. But if you ordered that here, you'd get one of those little Hoovers, you know, the Henry Hoovers.
• 1:07:13
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Right. WordPress contributor toolkit. This is just something I'm going to let you know about. I don't know that there's much for us to discuss about it. But if you, if you're a contributor, or rather, if you would like to contribute to the WordPress project, and you've always found it a little bit daunting getting the tools set up that you need in order to do that. And I think there's probably a lot of people who would like to contribute but don't have the necessary tooling. Now that has been made relatively straightforward with a thing called the WordPress contributor toolkit. And it's, it's gone out up to version 1.2. It really wasn't that long ago that it launched as version one. But now it's version 1.2.
• 1:07:54
  Nathan Wrigley: I won't go into all the details of it, but basically it makes the process of having all the tools or an increasingly large suite of tools available at your disposal in a very simple, straightforward way to download and get going. You can go and check it out, make.wordpress.org. I'll link to it in the show notes tomorrow. Anybody want to comment on that? I didn't think anybody would. The only thing I probably want to say is this sounds good purely because I know that whenever I've done like Contributor Days and, oh, I'm going to Contributor Core and things, I'd spend half of it setting up a PC.
• 1:08:28
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Exactly, right? Exactly. So I think to make it quicker. Yeah. Oh, so there's a perfect use case for it. If you turn up to a WordCamp and you want to do Contributor Day, you could click a few buttons and you'd be ready to go, whereas actually a lot of people spend half of Contributor Day setting up the tools.
• 1:08:45
  Nathan Wrigley: because they've never done it before. That's just dead time. More importantly, though, back to drinks. This is an Arnold Palmer, apparently, is iced tea and lemonade. So we've got Henry and we've got an Arnold Palmer. Keep them coming. This is now what this show has become. It's tell us about your recipes and what they are called. And if they're named after a human, all the better.
• 1:09:11
  Nathan Wrigley: Right. I don't know if this is worthy of mention. I genuinely don't. But I saw this. I think I saw this in Remcus's newsletter. I think it was Remcus's within WordPress newsletter. And I just thought I'd mention it to amplify a little bit. I've not used it. I know nothing about it. I'm not really a big aficionado of AI in any way, so I can't really speak to it. But this feels like the sort of way things are probably going to start going in the future because this is something called Delta and it's billing itself as the agent first theme with a built in MCP.
• 1:09:41
  Nathan Wrigley: I'll just read the headline. Your agent builds the whole site in a unified theme surface in plain HTML. CSS and JavaScript using the block editor just for content, which I think is the bit that captured my attention. No widget collection, no wrapper markup, no builder interface. Works with any MCP client and then it goes on to describe how it works and so on and so forth. They've got lifetime pricing at the moment. If you're into AI and still want to use WordPress as the content piece of that jigsaw puzzle, I don't know, maybe this is something worthy of looking at.
• 1:10:15
  Nathan Wrigley: That's all I've got to say. So, Steve, Raquel, Rhys, if you have, fine. If not, I'll move on.
• 1:10:23
  Nathan Wrigley: That'll be a no then. Okay, that's fine. Righty-ho. So, right, Steve, we're back to this bit. You mentioned in your, when we were talking about collaborative editing and what have you, you mentioned this thing called the Presence API, which I confess I don't think I'd ever even heard of. You've raised this. Do you want to lean into this for a few minutes? Tell us what it is and how it works.
• 1:10:48
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I guess this is kind of where the actual impact of the collaboration work has ended up moving much more quickly. Together with the notes feature as well, we're going to start to see this kind of stuff landing in core pretty soon. If you scroll down, I think maybe they have like a dashboard view here, maybe. Yeah, there was. There you go.
• 1:11:14
  Nathan Wrigley: You can see who is logged into the site. You can see what they're doing. It works on multi-site as well. So, if you're on the main dashboard of a multi-site, you can see who's logged into each sub-site and what they're doing. So, is this about who's doing what right this moment? So, is it approximating real-time? Like, okay, John's over. He's editing that post. Suzanne's over there. She's modifying a theme file, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing.
• 1:11:43
  Nathan Wrigley: I guess in the era of full site editing, it would be nice to know. But even in a Google Docs sort of interface, you don't really have that. Or maybe you do. I don't know. I've never lurked into that kind of interface. Maybe the admins do. I don't know. Yeah, you do have a little toolbar across the top of Google Docs that shows you who's looking at it right now. Yeah, but only the one that you're in, right? Whereas this is site-wide, so you get to see what everybody's doing on your entire site all at once. So I think it was a building block that collaborative editing was going to be built on top of, but it's proved to be somewhat useful by itself. And so this is coming to WordPress along with all the improvements to the note features.
• 1:12:23
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, interesting. I mean, these things are just so counterintuitive to me because I'm never in the environment where they'd be useful to me. But like I said, you know, if you've got a team like TechCrunch or something where you're producing 15 articles a day, knowing who's doing what I suppose is quite useful. Anything else on that?
• 1:12:43
  Nathan Wrigley: Yes, if you go down there, on that part there, there's quite a bit of talk with this about having a user type called agents.
• 1:12:53
  Nathan Wrigley: So you'll be able to see not just which human beings are on the site at the same time as you, but also which AI agents are in the site doing things as well.
• 1:13:06
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Right, again, back to the important stuff, drinks.
• 1:13:14
  Nathan Wrigley: Is that American lemonade or soda-like lemonade? Americans just use sugary lemon juice, but British... No, lemonade's lemonade. 7-Up is not lemonade, it's 7-Up. If you ask for a lemonade, you typically won't get a 7-Up, Courtney, just so that we can clear that important point up. And then something called a mimosa. I don't know what that is either. It's half. It's half? Half orange juice, half, it's supposed to be champagne.
• 1:13:43
  Nathan Wrigley: But a lot of times it's like a breakfast drink doing that call on a Monday. It's very difficult for me to summarize what this call is. This is a perfect example. Yeah, we talked about drinks.
• 1:13:57
  Nathan Wrigley: Mimosa is like the 10 o'clock in the morning alcohol. Yeah, that's right. I hope nobody is drinking at 10 o'clock in the morning. By the way, Seth says this is so cool. I think you must be talking about the whole thing, right, Seth? This whole episode is so cool. I appreciate that. Okay, back to the actual code again. Oh, no, he must be talking about the presence. I think he's talking about the presence. Yeah, darn. Could be handy for people to keep track of your agents. I was wondering if it was going to end up being used to keep track of your employees, which there was a little bit of me which was a bit saddened when I thought about that, you know, when COVID came around and all of a sudden all the employers when they've got staff working at home wanted to keep a track on exactly who was doing what I was wondering if the TechCrunch staff, for example, might use this to figure out how many posts have you been in today.
• 1:14:50
  Nathan Wrigley: Have we seen you actually lurking around in the WordPress website?
• 1:14:57
  Nathan Wrigley: I think this is cool. I mean, I've been quite positive for me today. I think the AI agency, fair enough, is what it is. There was a thing we're talking about, post-locking. There was something, yeah. So this is probably where, like, the example I gave before of, like, somebody's in the post, could you lock this? Almost like, say, well, you could choose if you want to lock the post and you could then just take over. So rather than just being always on.
• 1:15:41
  Nathan Wrigley: And always off, it's a let the user decide. So that could work well. Yeah, this could be interesting. So many things inside of the WordPress ecosystem, little things like this, which I'd never heard of before, which is really fascinating. But, you know, because we started the whole thing, now we have to go back to the drinks. Iron Brew is a thing.
• 1:16:07
  Nathan Wrigley: If you live in Scotland, I'm going to do my only Scottish accent impression, you're going to hear it once and then I'll never do Scottish again. And it goes like this. Oh, no, I can't. I can't bring myself to do it now. Do it. No, I can't. I'm smiling. I can't do it when I'm smiling. OK, here we go. So it's an advert for Iron Brew. And it goes like, do you remember the Iron Brew advert Steve and Reece that used to go bars, Iron Brew made in Scotland from Genders?
• 1:16:36
  Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember that? Yeah, there we go. Buckfast is another Scottish drink, but I wonder if Nathan's heard of a Bloody Mary. Yes, that's tomato juice, right, with Worcestershire sauce in it and things like that. And there we go. Let's move on. Oh, I'm all embarrassed now. Right. Right. So, Steve, your thing. This is the deluge, I'm presuming because of AI, in the plugin, well, the repository. You've actually got the numbers written in the show notes. I don't know if you can see those, but they were the, I suppose they were the big ones.
• 1:17:14
  Nathan Wrigley: It, which gave away what's going on. Do you want to tell us a little bit about this?
• 1:17:18
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So, this was inspired by Imran, I think, who's in the comments. I saw a post he put out about how weird things are getting with the plugin repo right now. That the number of submissions is just skyrocketing. Great. And I'm like, okay? It's okay. We're talking like multiples of previous years, like 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 times previous years in terms of submissions, but also a lot of the submissions are just not getting followed up on.
• 1:17:58
  Nathan Wrigley: People will vibe code something, they'll submit it to the repo, they'll get pushed back, and they'll be like, well, I got bored, I moved on.
• 1:18:07
  Nathan Wrigley: So the numbers are crazy, and we've been feeling the impact of this. We've been putting a few plugins through the submission process lately, and it's interesting times right now to try and get a plugin on the repo. So they're using a lot of AI tools to give feedback now, and for those of you guys that have been around for a while, it used to take months to get feedback from the, even like a year or so ago, it used to be that they'd say, You might have to wait 16 weeks to get feedback on your plugin for the first time.
• 1:18:53
  Nathan Wrigley: We did one last week, 5 minutes, 5 minutes. We submitted a plugin and there was a big AI report in our inbox 5 minutes later.
• 1:19:03
  Nathan Wrigley: But did you manage, okay, let's do the numbers first because I think this is really interesting.
• 1:19:08
  Nathan Wrigley: So, 2022, this is per month, right? Is that right? Are these numbers per month? Yeah. So, in 2022, there were 129 submissions to the WordPress plugin repo per month. By 2023, more or less the same, you know, 100 and something, 107. Start to see a little bit of a rise, 2024, 145. Then along come the AI agents, I'm guessing, and we start to see a bit of an incline, 254 last year.
• 1:19:37
  Nathan Wrigley: Now, this year, currently... Now, this year, currently... That's nuts. 1,021, I just don't know how the humans are supposed to keep up with that. I guess the answer is they're not. We are kind of in the era of doing things with AI, like you've just described. But that is a lot of things for people to manage, and I just don't know how we keep up with that, basically. Yeah. If you look at the numbers in that, the plug-in queue stats, and granted this is just a snapshot, you're looking at it and going 4,598 in the queue. Of those, the pending waiting for author is 3,860.
• 1:20:23
  Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Okay. But that is what Steve is saying, is that of the queue, the people... The people who are vibe-coding it have a go, can't get on and go on to the next thing. Right. Don't even reply to the email coming back. Just drop it. Yeah. So that's just wasted effort on everybody's behalf, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, yes, but again, if what Steve is saying is, you know, and there's no reason for it to not be true, because he does it more often, but in five minutes it gets to send and it's an AI.
• 1:21:00
  Nathan Wrigley: So, I think there's almost like a little bit of saying if you've got an AI to code your bot, we are going to respond to it with AI. So, and it filters out, you know, the AI, the the, the the vibe coders and everything. I do like that. Don't want to say low effort, but almost like the low effort kind of people who find code. And then people who go through that one step, like Steve, like myself and when I put code on the repository, like most of the people in chat, because I know a few people have got code, then you get the more, you know, the feedback that kind of makes sense.
• 1:21:52
  Nathan Wrigley: And there are times when I've replied to feedback as a plugin developer and gone, no, this is why this is, you know, the AI was wrong. Or I said, look, we've done it this way because of this. And once you get to a human, they're like, okay, well, fair enough kind of thing. There have been, you know, it's things like that. Thank you, Rhys. Thanks for that. Two very important comments coming up. Firstly, This one. Nobody's ever said that before. Can we just end on that? I think Nathan's absolutely right. Can we just stop there? Because nobody's ever said that before. Can we just screenshot that? Is that the title of the show? Yeah. Oh yeah, that's the title, baby. That's what this one's going to be called. I think Nathan's absolutely right. Brilliant. And then the next one is just totally out of context. I saw this. Steve licked a hammer.
• 1:22:51
  Nathan Wrigley: Mate, that's got to be the title. Surely that's got to be the episode title for this one, Steve. Amber, what's going on with that comment? I'm trying to parse the, where does it fit into everything? Steve licked a hammer and compared the flavor. I'm not, I don't, I love it. It sounds like a song title. Steve licked a hammer.
• 1:23:22
  Nathan Wrigley: Like 1 in 20 kind of territory is actually a human being now. Okay. My fear is that number of Vibe-coded plugins has come in fast and go dead fast because the authors move on to other interests. Yeah, it's a one-shot, right? It's a one-er. If you don't get it in first time, you just move on, do something else. Well, the feedback that comes from the AI is detailed. Some of our plugins get like multiple page PDFs. The AI is just able to do a much deeper dive than a human ever could. And so I think probably 95% of the plugins on the repo would not qualify for the repo right now.
• 1:24:05
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's also very true. Right, right. The bar for new plugins. Which is a benefit, I guess, of the AI era, that we can raise the bar really high on what plug-in submissions are approved. Amber says, oh, so it was about a Bloody Mary. Now I wonder if Nathan has heard as a Bloody Mary. Steve licked a hammer and compared the flavour. Okay, so apparently a Bloody Mary tastes like a hammer.
• 1:24:34
  Nathan Wrigley: I confess I've never licked a hammer, so I'm going to try that. That's this evening's study. Go out and lick a hammer and then try a Bloody Mary and see if the same. Thank you, Amber. I appreciate you giving us the context there. Right, let's quickly wrap it up. There's a few things that I wanted to mention. The first one is this, Rodolfo Malogli from, please Raquel, tell me the event name it is.
• 1:25:00
  Nathan Wrigley: Check out. Thank you. Check out Summit. Thank you. Check out Summit, amongst other things. He's in the WooCommerce space, and he's got the idea that there's quite a lot of WooCommerce plugins at the minute which are not getting the attention that they deserve, so he's come up with this idea called Save the Plugin, and it's almost like a little mini-community that you get yourself involved in, and it feels like you drop into almost like a Slack channel or something like that, and you help each other during this month-long initiative.
• 1:25:29
  Nathan Wrigley: I don't know when it began or when it's going to. Maybe it hasn't begun already, but it's a 30-day sprint for premium plug-in founders to try and get you basically back on track if your plug-ins are foundering or at least not getting it. If you scroll down a little, he's got an interesting business model. Tell me where I should stop. Oh, there. Just that bit there. Back up, back up. Back up, back up. How it works. Right. Simple three steps. Join the program, buy your seat, and get to a private Slack group.
• 1:25:58
  Nathan Wrigley: I was right. It was Slack, yeah. Number two, do the work. Finish the 20 tasks in 30 days, posting proof that you did it as you go, and then finally, finish everything. Pick up the reward that fits you. What's the reward? Finish the check. Get more. Then a hundred percent back in credit. Ooh! So you get some cash back in return. That is an interesting model. How do you make that pay? I think we need to speak to Redolf. I think it's, I don't think it's cash. I think it's...
• 1:26:26
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah, it looks like... So, yeah, if you scroll down... You have to choose. Yeah, you have to choose. Oh, okay. Pick one when you finish. Four months as a Woo Weekly Balcony classified. One year of business. Okay, so yeah. Okay, so it feeds into the different bits and pieces. That he's got going on like Business Bloomer and Checkout Summit. That is an interesting business model. I like that. That's very clever.
• 1:26:52
  Nathan Wrigley: He's a clever chap, is Rodolfo, isn't he? So he's kind of promoting his other services and events and things through this. Sort of feedback loop. Very cool.
• 1:27:02
  Nathan Wrigley: A comment that's just come in from Elliot. Apparently he started today. Okay. So go and check it out.
• 1:27:09
  Nathan Wrigley: The URL is, as you'd imagine, savetheplugin.com. Thank you, Elliot, for letting us know of the dates.
• 1:27:18
  Nathan Wrigley: Very, very last few. I promise we'll get out of your hair quickly. One billion downloads. There's not much more to say than that. As far as I'm aware, there is no plugin that has got anywhere close to that. This is, of course, Yoast. Yoast has now been downloaded a billion times, which is pretty impressive. We all know what it does and how it works and all of that. But just to say, wow, what a milestone. A billion downloads. That's really impressive.
• 1:27:45
  Nathan Wrigley: So, bravo to those people.
• 1:27:50
  Nathan Wrigley: OpenStation has now officially launched. It used to be called Desktop Mode but it's now officially called OpenStation. Can I just say go check it out? I know I keep banging on about this. It's my hobby horse. I love it. I think it's such a great idea. It's like imagine a desktop for your WordPress website. I know that most of you don't want it or have no interest in it, but it's so great. It's such a good idea and it enables you to do, for example, I don't know, previewing.
• 1:28:17
  Nathan Wrigley: In real time, so you put where you're editing on the left, what you want to preview on the right or you could have the media library. It's got like a little dock interface that you might have, you know, on your Mac or something like that. It's just a desktop version all living inside of a browser tab. So I thought that was pretty cool. And now it's officially called OpenStation and we haven't got time for that last one, I don't think, sadly.
• 1:28:43
  Nathan Wrigley: But there we go. And yeah, you're right, Steve. I haven't mentioned show.fm at all. There's an app now if you're into podcasting. It's called show.fm. There. I've mentioned it. There we go. Oh, come on. Next week you need a t-shirt. I need a hat. Yeah, I need a hat. I need a t-shirt. I need to do the whole thing.
• 1:29:02
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, if you're making a podcast, go to show.fm. Go check it out. Because me and Dan maybe. Mostly Dan. 99% Dan. I talk about it. Dan does the hard work. But we've got an app if you're a podcaster and you want help making your podcast easier. So there you go. Right. That's it. So do we call this episode? Do we call it? So I'm after a vote of hands from our panelists. Do we call it? Nathan is absolutely right. Or do we call it Steve Lick to Hammer?
• 1:29:30
  Nathan Wrigley: What do you reckon? Call it sponsored by show.fm. Okay. Okay. Steve Lick to Hammer sponsored by show.fm. Should we go with that? I think Steve Lick to Hammer just sounds so funny. Yeah, okay. Let's just go with that. Go with Steve Lick to Hammer. So Amber, this episode is going to be called Steve Lick to Hammer and you can... You can go and tell him that it's because he licked a hammer trying to spot the flavour of Bloody Mary. That's it! Oh, that was weird. It all kind of went a bit bear-shaped there. Let me make that far away.
• 1:30:00
  Nathan Wrigley: We will be back this Monday to talk about more WordPress-y different bits and pieces. But I guess before we say goodbye to our guests, I want to thank everybody. Quite a few comments in there, the obvious things that got your attention this week. AI as usual, and then a whole load of stuff around events at the beginning. And then towards the end, drinks.
• 1:30:25
  Nathan Wrigley: And more drinks. More drinks. More drinks. Terrible at marketing. I am so terrible at marketing. You're absolutely right. No Spacefast. There's no time. That could be a whole episode, Elliot. Come on and we'll talk about Spacefast at some point. That would be lovely. So thank you to you, the commenters. But also, obviously, thank you to Rhys. Thank you to Raquel. And thank you to Steve. Thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Please come on again. And good luck in the first case with PressConf. Raquel, I hope that goes well.
• 1:31:00
  Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Try to make it to the event in Manchester. That would be really nice. But we will see you next time on This Week in WordPress. Cheers. And if you three want to stick around to have a little bit of a nap, that would be nice. What's that? Oh, hands. Hands. We've got to do the hands. Thank you. Can we all show our hands? Thank you. God damn it. I'm so hopeless. Managing this show. My head is full up. Thank you so much. We're hands.
• 1:31:28
  Nathan Wrigley: Just say hands a lot of time and I'll understand. Right. We'll be back. See you later. See you next week. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye.
• 1:31:48
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh.