Nathan Wrigley

Hello there. Hello, I’m going to say hello for about 5 more seconds. Hello, The reason for that is that the audio for the first five or 10 seconds is rubbish. And it kind of figures it out slowly over the 1st 10 seconds. So there we go.

Now I’ll begin. Hello. Welcome to This Week in WordPress, episode number 350. Thank you for those people who’ve already made a comment. That’s really nice. Appreciate it.

We’ll get to you guys in a moment. Before we do that, I would just like to introduce our panel. We’re obviously here to natter about WordPress and what better than to have a bunch of enthusiastic WordPressers joining us. And let’s go first. Let’s go this way.

Firstly, we’ll go. Yeah, he’s hiding. It’s Taco. Taco Verdonchot. How are you doing, Taco?

Taco Verdonschot

I’m all good, yes.

Nathan Wrigley

He’s all good. Every bit of you is good. I’m pleased.

Taco Verdonschot

Every single bit.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, I was very lucky to spend a bit of time with Taco over the last few days. We hung out, went for a late night walk around London because it was, there was a couple of events happening in London, which we were both attending. There was Loop Conf and then there was also the WPLDN meetup. And it was a pleasure having some time with you. It was really nice. Thank you.

Taco Verdonschot

Likewise absolutely.

Nathan Wrigley

Hanging out and spending time with me. So who is Taco? Let’s find out. So Taco is the CCO at Progress Planner, which is a plugin that helps you maintain your website by rewarding you for completing important five-minute tasks on your site. He is also active in the WordPress Community Team, WordPress Accessibility Day organizer, WP Meetup organizer, and regular volunteer at his kids’ school. He and his family live in unpronounceable…Let me try, let me try.

No, you told me the other day.

Taco Verdonschot

I did. That’s why I put it in.

Nathan Wrigley

Vichen.

Taco Verdonschot

No. Wijchen.

Nathan Wrigley

Wijchen.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, Wijchen.

Nathan Wrigley

Viken in the, of course it’s a bit, I knew that, in the Netherlands and his wife says he’s, his wife says he’s happily married. Lovely. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. Okay, let’s go around the houses. So that was first. Let’s go in a sort of clockwise direction. That means we’re over with Rob. How are you doing, Rob Cairns?

Rob Cairns

Doing good. How are you?

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, good, good. Rob joins us from Canada. He’s been on the show many, many times before. And he is the founder and CEO at Stunning Digital Marketing, which is an agency that specializes in WordPress security. He’s also the creator and host of the SDM podcast. And in his spare time, he loves sports, music, reading, and time with his partner, Tiz. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. Those 2 panelists have been on the show many, many times before, but we’ve been joined by somebody for the very first time. And that is Rahul, Rahul Bansal down there.

How are you doing? Rahul is, let me get the bio. There it is. Rahul is the founder and CEO at rtCamp, which is an enterprise grade WordPress agency, consultant, sorry, consulting agency that recently launched a video first digital asset management or DAM solution. And you’re going to find out a little bit more about that. It is made specifically for WordPress. We’ll find out about that in just a moment. But that is our panel. 

Now, it would be lovely if we just spoke to the panel. I’d enjoy that tremendously. It would be the highlight of my Monday. But what would be better than that would be if you guys felt that you had it in you to comment. Anybody watching this, if you want to comment, that would really help bring the show along. Certainly keeps the conversation going. The best place to go for that is this URL. And sorry, Rahul, it does tend to cover somebody’s face up unless I get this setting right.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me see if I can do that. It’s supposed to be there. 

No, it’s not working today. There we go. That apparently is it. Yay. Go to wpbuilds.com forward slash live. Bring your, you know, your friends and your colleagues there. And there’s a YouTube set of comments over on the right of the video. If you’re on a desktop, it’ll be on the right.

If you’re on mobile, yeah, that right. The other right, that one. And if you’re logged into Google, you can comment there. However, if you don’t have a Google account, fear not, there’s a little black box at the top right-hand side of the video itself. If you look top right of the video, it says live chat. You can just click that button and you don’t need to be logged into anything. 

So yeah, perfect, perfect, perfect. It looks like there’s a few people who’ve already joined us and given us a comment. That’s really nice. The first one is Lawrence joining us from, well, typically Australia. Hello, he says, or hello, he says. Tammie, who was there in London, joining us and saying good afternoon. Oh, it’s the evening. It’s probably late. It’s probably like brutal o’clock where he lives, like, I don’t know, 11 at night or something. You’re going above and beyond, Lawrence. 

Courtney, who was with us in London also is joining us and she says, clearly it’s still the morning. 

Okay. Marcus Burnett, we’re talking about you in a minute, Marcus. Stay tuned. Says, my This Week in WordPress show starts at 9 am. That’s in the morning. Yeah. We’re at 2 am where I live.

I don’t know what time it is where Rahul lives. What time is it for you, Rahul?

Rahul Bansal

It’s 6.30 pm. 6.30 in the evening.

Nathan Wrigley

Dave Dunn, who joins us from London. He was there over the last week. Good afternoon from this side of the planet. Marcus says, I’ve already had a call this morning with someone in Australia where it was nighttime there. So my day is very confusing. Indeed, indeed.

And the comments just go on. Patricia says, hello. Paul Bedford, hello, Paul. Joining us from Pretoria in South Africa. And Amber Hind’s talking about you as well, or at least something that you’re involved in a little bit later as well. 

So there we go. Isn’t that lovely? Now, look, the comment, now, look, we’re not back to normal now. Auto shift. Let’s try that. So that is our panel. There are some of the audience members. 

Keep the comments coming in. Really, really appreciate that. It’s WordPress, isn’t it? We’re here to talk about WordPress. So let us do exactly that.

I will share my screen. Firstly, apologies, a little bit of self-promotion. This is us wpbuilds.com. If you head over there, is a single text field form just here. And if you put your e-mail address into that, we’ll send you a couple of emails. The purpose of this show really is to liven up your WordPress week, but also to repackage it and send it out on a Tuesday morning. So I will strip out the audio and the video and send it out as a video, but also send it out as a podcast episode. And if you subscribe, you’ll be notified when that happens.

But also every week we release a podcast, a audio podcast where I interview somebody. And I don’t know if you met this chap over the last week, Taco. This is a lovely guy called Sebastian Webb. And he was in London. And we talked last week about his brand new plugin called Amenda. Very cool, by the way. His brand new plugin called Amenda, which I just said, allows you to edit your content despite whatever tool you use to create it. So if you made it with Elementor or Beaver Builder or Gutenberg, he kind of steps in at the last moment and allows you to edit it with his tool. Click save and kind of a really neat tool. 

I don’t know, let’s say that you’re in, you’ve got somebody that’s inexperienced with those page builders or something like that. You can play with that.

Rob, I don’t know if it’s you. I think it might be, but there’s quite a lot of keyboard clickety clackety. If it is you, would you mind muting your mic if you’re doing the keyboard clickety-clackety? Carry on.

Rob Cairns

I was muted.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, don’t let me stop you doing the keyboard. That’d be lovely. But if it’s possible to mute when you’re not speaking, maybe that’s Rahul. I’m sorry. It could be anybody, but yeah. Thank you. Okay. There’s our self-promotional bit. 

However, I always give an opportunity to our guests to have a little bit of a promotion. That’s a nice quid pro quo, a nice back-slapping opportunity for those people who come on the show. 

And here is something that Rahul and his team over at rtCamp have been building. It’s called GoDAM. We mentioned it a moment ago. It’s on version 1.4. Rahul, briefly tell us what this is and what version 1.4 brings to the table.

Rahul Bansal

So GoDAM is a, like the name, it basically is a Hindi-Bengali word, which means warehouse. And our idea is to create a media warehouse that can act as a central digital asset management platform for all your WordPress site. It has a provision to extend beyond WordPress, but we are focusing on WordPress as a CMS because we are from the WordPress ecosystem. 

And since video is a popular format, most of the initial features are focused on videos, even though a digital asset can be anything, like it can be PDF, it can be an image, which are also on the roadmap. Our approach is to go with the integration into WordPress.

For example, we are integrating with the forms, LMS, e-commerce platforms, and basically the idea is anything that can benefit from any form of videos. And when we say videos, it’s not just would I put like a video as you see in YouTube for example most of the forms integration that you see uh like two of them are released in 1.4 total we have nine form Integrations SureForms, WPForms, Gravity Forms, Jetpack Forms, all forms are supported uh usually we integrate with forms in two ways one is that on the form page like uh when you create a form you have ability to allow people to add a video field through which they can do a screen recording, something like you might be helpful in job interview or any kind of video file, like for any purpose, like a video, audio, camera, mic, whatever you want, it records, put it in the central warehouse and shows seamlessly into your form into dashboard.

Likewise for LMS, we are doing how to put like so we started with LifterLMS, but we plan to eventually extend to other LMS also. The idea is that if you have a course where you expect people to watch a video lesson, so your course progress can be linked to the video player.

So unless people finish watching video, the course won’t be marked as complete. Sorry, the chapter won’t be marked as complete and they won’t be able to go to the next chapter.

So that is, so yeah. So this is our main motivation because there are like things like YouTube, Vimeo, so many players exist, but we wanted to build something that’s made for the WordPress ecosystem, which understand like the nitty gritties of how Gravity Forms work versus how LifterLMS works, which are like, so these are the things that WordPress people knows better.

They’re not just like dumb form or dumb content system.  There is like a reason so many people are building with WordPress and we thought like anytime they are, hitting the limit with amazing video features. We can allow them to do more rather than just embedding YouTube videos.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, video, I suppose, is a really great place to start, isn’t it? You mentioned that you’re going to pick other formats, maybe audio and stuff. That would obviously, somebody like me, that would be great because I mainly produce audio. But the idea being that you consume, if you don’t want to house your stuff all on YouTube for obvious reasons, if you’re like an LMS or something and you want your course to be hidden away, you can do it and the assets will be in this digital asset management system, in this case, built around the WordPress interface. And then, you can stream it natively if you like. Yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating. And now you’ve, on version 1.4, you’ve added the support for Ninja Forms, MetForm, and LifterLMS. I’m guessing Ninja Forms and MetForm, that’s a way of consuming data. So you can drop your video file, say in, and you know, the description that goes with it and so on. Yeah, okay.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, so it’s like somebody’s, say, a WordPress site is in Ninja Forms. With GoDAM, they can add a field like e-mail name, text area, they can add a recorder field through which people can record their screen. Yeah, so it can record screen also and camera also. So if some, say you’re reporting a bug, so you can turn on screencast.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, I see, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rahul Bansal

And it also records the audio. So it’s like we are video first, but on the way we are taking care of other formats as we encounter. Although we are not podcast ready yet, but that’s one of the goals to not only give the podcast, but also monetization option.

Nathan Wrigley

Can I make a feature request? Just I had this idea years ago, right? And I never saw it through, but I thought it would be a great idea. What if the WordPress commenting system, oh, my camera is going to do this today for reasons I don’t know. It just switches off every few minutes. When it goes black, I’ll just click the button and it’ll come back. Can I suggest that something like GoDAM allows me to do video comments on a blog post. So instead of writing text and clicking enter and it goes into the moderation queue, what if I could do a video reply to the comment and then other people could reply with a video, you know, just like me, just saying, yeah, that was a really nice piece. I really enjoyed that. I love the part where you talked about this, that and the other thing. I’ve often thought in the, you know, in the year 2025, a video comment thread, it’d be kind of fun.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay, I’m going to plant that seed and leave it. Over to you.

Rahul Bansal

I think we already have it because GoDAM is a successor to one of our old platform called rtMedia Transcoder. And rtMedia Transcoder, I think you put that feature some 10 years ago.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, darn, okay, I know.

Rahul Bansal

I’m still verified because it happens sometimes during refactoring the features that were less talked about or not used often go missing. But if it’s missing, then we can bring it back in two days.

Nathan Wrigley

Well, the cost of video hosting 10 years years ago was quite high. Now it’s basically free.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah

Nathan Wrigley

If you use something like Cloudflare, you don’t really, you pay to ingest it, but you don’t pay to see it over and over and over again. So you can distribute it infinitely for the same cost as it was to upload it. So maybe that’s worth another, anyway, there it is, GoDAM, version 1.4. 

I noticed a couple of comments in here. Dave Dunn, for example, saying, looks, sounds quite nice. Yeah, go check it out. It’s GoDAM spelt like you see, G-o-D-A-M.i-o. You can check it out. And they’ve got a blog, as you can see, so you can go and check that out. Okey-dokey. Right, let’s move on to the next piece. This is here. So we’re over to Taco, very much over to Taco here, because it’s a piece given to me by Taco. Site Spotlight. Tell us about this.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, so with Progress Planner, we want to help people move their sites forward. And one of the important things is knowing what needs work. And we’ve done site reviews in the past. We were actually on the WordCamp Europe stage with a couple of people doing live website reviews. 

And we figured, hey, this might actually be a nice YouTube format as well. So we have a couple episodes out now. We’re not keeping track because I don’t like to count, but there’s quite a few sites that we’ve reviewed and we’re only looking at, so you’ll see that the format has shifted already over the course of the episodes.

But right now what we’re doing is we look at four different areas for a site. So just the homepage, just the content, technical and accessibility. And will give you some feedback on each of those in each of those areas and turn that into a video so that everyone can learn from it.

Nathan Wrigley

Nice. And do you do you take submissions from the general public or is it?

Taco Verdonschot

Absolutely. Yes.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah. I love to have the submissions because typically what we see is those are the people who are actually also doing something with the recommendations that we give. Whereas if we take a public site, it might be gone unnoticed by the site owner. 

Nathan Wrigley

So where would we submit that if we want it to be part of Site Spotlight and have our site reviewed by you guys? Where do we go?

Taco Verdonschot  

You go to progressplanner.com/sitespotlight.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay.

Taco Verdonschot

Site-spotlight. And there’s a super short contact form. It basically asks for your website and if there’s a specific portion of the site, especially for the really large ones that you would like reviewed.

Nathan Wrigley

If only there was a solution out there which would enable you to capture a video, for example, where somebody could show what it was about their site that they wanted you to look at. That would be great if, oh, wait, it’s called GoDAM. Yes, there is. There is such a thing. Okay, so there we go. Site Spotlight.

What I’m linking to here, what you can see obviously is YouTube and you can see the backlog of the Site Spotlight endeavors, but also so you can find out more generally about Progress Planner as well. The URL is unreadable. It’s just loads of junk after the initial bit, but I’ll link in the show notes to that.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, or just go to progressplanner.com slash sites hyphen spotlight and you’ll find the link as well.

Nathan Wrigley

Good, OK, thank you so much. Right, OK, let’s move on. Actually, before we move on, let’s just address some of these comments because we’ve got a few going in. It seems to be a while. So for example, Hilay is joining us, says hello from India. Let’s make the screen go away. Hello, nice to have you with us. I’m probably going to miss a load out.

Taco Verdonschot

Reese says hi as well.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay, Reese says hi. Yeah, we’ve got somebody called On Your Mark Designs, good morning from Jersey. That’s really nice. And then somebody mentioned about, where was it? Video commenting, I was talking about that. Video comment says On Your Mark Designs, I wonder if this is somebody called Mark. Let us know in the comments. Video comments would need to be transcribed to help with moderation, I guess, unless they’re doing something visually. Definitely more involved than moderating text, but at least by offloading, you don’t need to consider how much space bandwidth the vids are eating off.

And then Amber joins in, yes, but moderating text is faster than moderating a video unless you have automated transcription. I feel like we’ve just started a whole product chunk conversation here. If we could just take this, take this over to get in touch with Rahul.

Rahul Bansal

We have AI transcription, by the way.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, okay. Nice nice, Amber, who is one of the founders, I’m not sure if that’s true, Amber, apologies if I’ve misspoken of WP Accessibility Day, but certainly one of the founders of Equalize Digital. The other concern, the other concern is accessibility. Could you force people to only include videos if they provide correct caption cards? So I guess we’re talking about the thing that I mentioned, the idea of having comments. Yes, good point. A transcription embedded underneath in sort of like a details block or something like an accordion or something might be quite nice. And then it just goes off in sort of AI verse where they talk about how Gemini may be able to. I’m going to let you guys thrash it out in the comments.  

Taco Verdonschot

There’s a very important comment because On Your Mark Designs is not Mark, but Lisa. 

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, sorry, Lisa apologies. I just, yeah, incorrectly assumed that there was something in the title there. Thank you for all of those comments, though. Really appreciate it. That’s great. Okay, let us move on. 

Let me change here. So this is a post that comes from the quite stunningly amazing Anne McCarthy. She has a blog called Nomad.blog and writes a load of stuff about WordPress. If you haven’t heard about Anne, then it’s definitely time that you did. And this is V2 of a post that she published all about WordPress 6.9. And if you haven’t been keeping track of what’s coming up, this is just a bit of a refresher about some of the things that are heading your way in WordPress 6.9. Some of these I’d actually not seen. So there’s video which accompanies it. 

So if you’re listening to this, pause it, go to wpbuilds.com, search for episode 350, and the links for everything are in there, including this one. The piece is called, like I said, exploring work in progress for WordPress 6.9v2. And the first thing she wants to mention is what I think is actually a really nice new thing, the ability to hide blocks.

And there’s a little video where you’ve got a simple show-hide toggle in the little menu, which pops up when you interact with a block. And I just thought that was quite nice. The ability to show and hide things in the back end is a neat idea. I’ll go through this and then you guys can jump in and let us know if any of this stood out. Then the command palette, think Spotlight on the Mac or what’s it called? Oh, there’s like a property’s name.

Rob Cairns

Alfred

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, Alfred or something like that.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley

Now, there was talk about whether or not this might be available on the frontend at some point. And I think the dust has settled on that and it’s not by the looks of it.  It’s just going to be backend, which kind of feels like the right decision to me at least anyway. I can’t see why you might want to use that on the frontend. But that’s now going to be more or less everywhere. The intention is that it really will surface almost anything that your page builder can do and your Gutenberg editor can do and all the settings and myriad different things that are in your WordPress backend. That’s quite nice. 

This is possibly the most talked about thing, I would imagine, is the idea of interacting with multiple people inside the same post. And the first step towards that Google Docs-like experience is to enable block commenting. So the idea that a specific block you can add comments to. If you can see the screenshot here, you can see it’s got like that Google Docs kind of feel. You click into a block, let’s say a paragraph, and then you write a comment, but it’s bound to that block. You can’t still highlight a bit of the paragraph and say, I don’t know, change these words. You’d have to be a little bit more granular. Once it was closed, it couldn’t be opened.

And so that’s what’s being addressed here, is the ability to reopen, close things, which kind of, you know, makes a lot of sense. And a load of new blocks, which are going to be coming down the pipe, maybe, not. So for example, the accordion block, terms query block, post breadcrumb block, icon block, stretchy text has to, I never know what the heck that is, but I like the sound of it. Stretchy text, tabs block, stabilize, oh, the time to read block and something about stabilizing the time of contents block as well. 

There is a load more in this post about simplified site editing, but I’ll leave it there. I’ll just throw it open. Please feel free to interrupt each other or me. Anything in there that catches your attention? If not, I’ll move on.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, the show and hide is definitely something that I think is very interesting as a first iteration, but hopefully, eventually will turn into a more of a dynamic show and hide version on the frontend.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, I mean, it’s a real kind of like nothing, but at the same time, it’s quite a lot. you might, I don’t know, you might be kind of in the middle of iterating through a block, a portion of the text that you, I don’t know, you just want to hide for now or something like that. It’s pretty cool. And you can see it on the screen if you’re able to watch it.  Thanks, Taco. Anything else from anybody else?

Okay. In which case, I will draw a line under that piece of content. You can find it on nomad.blog. Right, okay, this week was a bit of a strange week for me. Very occasionally, I get to interview somebody on the podcast who has been in my life for more years than I care to mention. And Dave Winer is one of those people.

He, I don’t know, I’ve been using the internet since it was, you know, very soon after it was available in the UK and a real consumer of it. And one of the first things that made the internet interesting, I think, was links, obviously. And then soon after that, people trying to find ways to discover and make your content discoverable. Dave Winer, who I managed to interview, was the person that basically invented RSS. I think there’s a little bit more of a story to it than that. But he’s been iterating on all sorts of cool ideas for many, many years. And very recently, although Dave would probably say he’s been into WordPress for a little while, he is now full on behind the WordPress project in a way that I rarely see. You know, he is all guns blazing about how profoundly great WordPress is. I was taken aback actually by how much he lauded its amazing capabilities. 

He loves the open web. And he’s got this idea called textcasting and also a project called WordLand and FeedLand. And he basically wants to turn the social web, so think Facebook, Twitter and so on. He wants you to basically surrender using those and start using this idea called text casting. And it will all be RSS based and it will be based largely on your WordPress website, but it could be any platform. And he explains it to me. 

I am butchering what it is. But what, if somebody else had said it, you’d be kind of like, yeah, that sounds interesting. But when you get somebody of his caliber and they say it, you’re kind of like, okay, I’m going to sit up and pay attention. It is well worth listening to. So it’s all about making WordPress. So think something like Mastodon, but much more closely integrated with technologies like RSS and what have you.  So absolutely fascinating. I have no idea that if anybody wants to comment on that, ’cause you probably didn’t listen to it, but if you do wanna comment, let me just pause and go for it.

Taco Verdonschot

I’m just curious to see if he still has it to launch something that is going to be so widely adopted that no one remembers life without it.

Nathan Wrigley

He’s older than I am, that’s as much as I know. And if you’re older than I am, it’s probably time to sit in a chair, but not Dave. I’ve got the feeling that Dave has masses of energy. I don’t know if you noticed on one of the things that we mentioned earlier, I think it was this one. Where’s it gone? 

There was a, was it this one? No, Anyway, we posted it there. Yeah. Well, anyway, I saw a comment from him a moment ago, right at the top of one of the, oh yeah, it’s one of the ones that we’re going to get to. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, he’s full gongs blazing. And if you like the idea of an open social web and you don’t want to have your stuff corralled behind Facebook or the Twitter platform, and you don’t want a limit on text and you want to be able to add images and you want to add hyperlinks and all that kind of stuff, stay tuned. Go and Google Dave Winer. Absolutely fascinating. Anybody else? Mark says RSS is awesome. It is. And we have Dave Winer to be thankful for.

Rob Cairns

Makes podcasting easier, Nathan.

Nathan Wrigley

It makes podcasting possible, doesn’t it? If you think about it, there is no such thing as a podcast without the RSS technology. And so he is, that I think is largely why I’m so a bit, a bit kind of like, well, I don’t know, I’m a bit of a fanboy, put it that way. I was actually really tongue tied when I started interviewing him, which doesn’t often happen. I kind of have to explain. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m a bit of a fan. If my words don’t come out straight.

Rob Cairns

I think we’re all fans.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah. Okay, there’s a few comments come in all about the different bits and pieces that Anne shared. I’ll just leave you to thrash those comments around between each other. I won’t raise those on the screen, but yeah. Okey-doke, let us move on. 

We’re back to Taco. Although, to be fair to Taco, he didn’t ask me to put this in. I put this in the show notes of my own accord. I thought it was a really interesting observation though. It’s entitled WordPress Flagship WordCamp, sorry, WordPress’s flagship WordCamp strategy is a mess. You’re not holding back, Taco. And 2026 will be hell. He says, go on, lay it for it, lay it out for us. Because there’s not many of us that go to all the events, but for those of us that do try to get to all the events, this is is very important. Tell us what’s the problem?

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, so first of all, I think it’s a good thing that we’re not all trying to go to all of these events because we don’t want the flagship work camps to be sort of the same 1000 people just meeting three times a year in different places in the world, because from a sustainability perspective, that’s not what we should be aiming for. 

However, there are quite a few companies, for example, and let’s take a smaller plug-in shop like WS Form. If Mark doesn’t go, none of his other employees, wait, he’s alone. So he’ll have to go to all three if he wants to represent his company. But even a company like Yoast, that I happen to know a bit about, only has so many people they can send to events.

So you will see the same people traveling over and over again. But also from an organizing perspective, those resources, even within larger companies, are fairly limited. So there is a significant portion of WordCamp attendees that goes to a lot of WordCamps. 

Now, the three flagships, before we only had one, only WordCamp Europe, then that was in 2013. Then in 2015, we got WordCamp US as the second flagship. And we were supposed to have the first WordCamp Asia in 2020, but then we had COVID. So that was postponed a couple of years. 

But now we have 3 flagship WordCamps. And historically, those have been separated in over the year pretty well. However, next year, the three of them, WordCamp Asia, WordCamp Europe, and WordCamp US are happening within 4 1/2 months from each other. 

So WordCamp Asia is happening in April, and WordCamp US is happening in August. And that’s creating a very condensed schedule for those flagships. And that makes it really, really hard for those who have to attend two or three of them to properly organize their presence and well, also financially it makes it a bit harder if it’s not spread over the year, but all so condensed. 

So I think that we shouldn’t have competing flagship events. And right now, those events are competing for time and money and that’s not helping anyone. 

Nathan Wrigley

So the, I guess maybe some people will sort of say, if you’re in the privileged position to go to these WordCamp events over multiple, multiple, three, let’s say, or four or whatever it may be, you might go to all the smaller ones, that you’re in a very good position. However, I think you made the point really well that it’s not really about that. A lot of these people will be employees and they will be, you know, expected to go. It’s part of their job description and what have you.

So it’ll be a lot of travel. And if they’ve got a family or, dependents or whatever it may be, there’s a lot of things that are coalescing at the same time. But also just the organisational side of it, takes a lot to get your stuff ready. And if it’s a part of your job description, then it may be that, you know, you’re going to struggle with your regular job. A lot of money is involved and so on.

And obviously these events cannot happen without the kind sponsorship of many of these companies. And I guess in some respects, it may feel a little bit less attractive. If you’re going to be seriously worn out, you maybe step away from one of them or something like that.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah.

Rob Cairns 

And but even more so, Nathan. And I just want to jump in. Sorry, Tako. If you’re talking sponsors, are the sponsors getting the best bang for the buck if all this is happening condensed instead of spread out from an issue of visibility? And I’m not so sure, being a marketer, that they’re getting the best bang for the buck if it’s all condensed. Long-term visibility is better. So I think condensing the schedule doesn’t really help the sponsors either from that perspective.

Nathan Wrigley

Just raise a couple of comments that have come in and then I’ll come back to you, Taco.  So the first one is Patricia. Let’s just make sure that Rob’s face doesn’t get erased. I remember WordCamp Europe says Patricia had to be in June because in the past WordCamp US was in December. Okay, so that’s separating them by a full, what’s that, six months or so, half of the year.

So that was obviously a decision which was made. Somebody sat there and decided to move things around, shuffle the chess pieces around so they were all evenly spread.  Amber, back again. Hello. WordCamp US being in August is very difficult for parents with the start of school. It’s the first week of school for us and will not be, so will not be there again this year. Okay, so there’s a direct consequence right there. Amber will not be attending because of school.

I mean, I think we can all agree, getting the priorities right, but it would have been nice if you didn’t have to have that conflict of interest. Taco, go on.

Taco Verdonschot

And I think that is specifically for WordCamp US being in almost mid-August. If you look at typical attendance for WordCamp US, it’s obviously a lot of people from the US, but also a lot of Europeans typically travel to WordCamp US.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah 

Taco Verdonschot

And in Europe, we have July and August as the main summer holiday months. And so it is going to be challenging for parents, absolutely. But even if you’re not a parent and you take time off over the summer, and the first thing happening when you come back from your vacation is WordCamp US, usually those last six to four weeks before the event are hard work. Especially if you have a larger presence, if you build a booth, if you have to come up and bring goodies, all of that. A lot of that happens in the last couple of weeks before the event.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, yeah.

Taco Verdonschot

And now this time, that is smack in the middle of the summer. So if you’re dealing with staff being on leave, on vacation, that will add to the complexity of having an event in August. And especially because it’s very hard to organize beforehand, because that’s when WordCamp Europe is.

Nathan Wrigley 

Yeah, really, really interesting. Everything colliding over this small amount of time. I mean, obviously, given the nature of how WordCamps are set up and structured and run, then everybody is free to do what they want. But I suppose what you’re saying, and I’ll just pop the piece back up on the screen, let me take Amber’s comment away, you have some thoughts on potentially how we might do this better in the year 2027. And yeah, okay.

Taco Verdonschot

As much as I hate to say it, because I love going to WordCamps, and I would love if I could make that a full-time job, just traveling around the world, meeting WordPress people all over.

Nathan Wrigley

Nice.

Taco Verdonschot

I know it’s not a job, so I’m, you know, that’s not possible, but we might be better off slimming down to having only two flagship WorthCamps a year, and then have them travel across the globe. Because over time, we’ll add a flagship event in Africa, probably. We’ll add a flagship event in South America at some point. We might have a flagship event in Australia. And we can’t do five or six a year, can we?

Nathan Wrigley

We have to make some hard decisions at that point.

Taco Verdonschot

Exactly.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah.

Taco Verdonschot

So if we have only two, that makes it a lot easier for sponsors. And you can still travel the world because I see in one of the comments, or we have to accept you can’t go to everything. And that’s absolutely true. However, we have a lot of big companies in our ecosystem. where the people in Asia would absolutely love to meet those companies who are from Europe or from the US. And if those companies decide to prioritize, always prioritize WordCamp US and WordCamp Europe over Asia, then our Asian community will not meet those European or American companies and vice versa. rtCamp might not be able to attend all three, prioritize Asia, and then miss out on the US market. So, it’s not as easy as maybe just don’t go to everything.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, thank you. Okay, so I will obviously link to this in the show notes that I put out tomorrow, but you can find it over at progressplanner.com and then search for, maybe just Google it, WordPress’s flagship WordCamp strategy is a mess and 2026 will be hell with some options for how 2027 might be run. Okay, speaking of that, let me just, I’m going to miss that one out for a second and I’m just going to skip to this. We’ll come back to that other one in a moment. 

This may be a solution. I don’t know what Marcus feels about this, but Marcus over at the WP World, so the WP.world, has been curating the WordPress community over the last couple of years in all sorts of ways. So, you know, you can set up a profile and tell people about yourself and you can bind it to where you’re going to these events and so on. But what you’re seeing here is the 2025 upcoming events page.

Now, whether or not we would want to rely on Marcus for this, I don’t know, but it seems like a certainly a credible way of going about it. Having some central repository for this kind of information might be kind of interesting. And then everybody could go in not just the WordPress events that are run under WordPress.org or the chapter program, but also all the other meetups and other things that go on in the WordPress space. 

Like we had an event in London last week that many people attended, but it was not done under the WordPress.org auspices. So if you didn’t know that was going on, you may have missed that. So having one place, so maybe the WP World would be a good spot for that or something similar. So Marcus, if you’re still in the comments, I’d be interested to know what your thoughts are on that. Tammie’s got another comment.  Sorry, Rob, or yes, your head keeps disappearing. Just get the top of your head. The cause impact needs to be balanced, different for sponsors and also attendees. That’s a point, but it’s also not a solid approach to say, and it’s truncated to reduce them. Some can’t travel. Okay. Oh, David. Oh, sorry, Dovid, apologies. GatherPress. Does GatherPress offer a central repository, Dovid? My understanding is GatherPress is more of a I’m running an event, so I’ll use GatherPress in order. I didn’t.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, it’s a meetup.com alternative.

Nathan Wrigley

Right. Oh, but does it have a platform in the background? So, like we were looking at on the screen there with…I don’t think it does. I think it’s just for, so it’s not a central repository showing all the different bits and pieces. But anyway, a bit of thinking in advance and checking out what all the other people do. I know it’s a lot of extra legwork making sure that the calendar is clear and then obviously, you know, hard decisions would need to be made anyway because there may be inevitable clashes that can’t be overcome.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah. And that’s the thing. There’s more events happening than we have days in the year. So there will always be a clash. But for our three main events to clash, that’s just bad planning.

Nathan Wrigley

I’m so sorry, Rob. Every time I put up a comment, your entire face is erased. That’s not my intention. So here’s Marcus, back to us. Right, so here we go. I’d love to add meetups as well, but I need something I can automate. I add all events manually right now. Okay, so that’s quite a lot of work for you to do, but having something over there would be quite amazing. So, okay, now we’re talking. Okay, David, it’s a WIP. I don’t know what’s WIP.

Taco Verdonschot

Work in progress.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, thank you. Okay, thank you. Yes, it is very much a work in progress. Sorry, it’s because it’s surrounded by W&P. I’m thinking it must be a WordPressy thing. No, it’s not. Yes, it’s a plugin that you can self-host. Amber is adding a cautionary note saying it’s not good on the accessibility. 

So there we go. There’s my camera that’s gone again. I shall lean over and press the button. What fun. Marcus says he’s been talking, oh, he’s been talking to the GatherPress folks and that may be the answer long term. Okay, there we go. Oh, isn’t it fun when we get involved in these conversations? That’s great. Right, okay, shall we move on? Do you think we’ve done that one?

So that was all about Taco and his bits and pieces. I’m going to stay on the events space and then we’ll come back to your other piece there, Taco. This piece is not new, but I just thought it was worth resurfacing. So we’re talking about flagship events. The next one coming up is going to be WordCamp Asia. 

And the dates have been announced and the venue has been announced. It’s going to be the 9th to the 11th of April 2026. And obviously that then puts it right at the beginning of the 4 1/2 month schedule. Taka was talking about, and it’s going to be in the, forgive my pronunciation here, the Jio World Convention Centre, which is in Mumbai in India. And that was announced about a month ago. So it’s no big news, but nevertheless, if you want to attend, that’s something you’re going to have to think about. 

This has now got ticketing available for it. This is PressConf. I think you can now get early bird tickets, which wasn’t the case just a week ago.So I don’t know what the cost is, but you can now join the list and get yourself on the early bird. This is one of the colliding things, though, if memory serves, PressConf, which is independently run outside of the chapter programme by, oh my goodness, I am so sorry. 

Taco Verdonschot

Raquel.

Nathan Wrigley

I’m sorry, Raquel. I feel terrible. Raquel didn’t know that there was going to be this collision and found out about it live in her seat when it was all announced. It’s going to be colliding with WordCamp US. So you have to make a choice. 

Taco Verdonschot

PressConf is colliding with WordCamp Asia.

Nathan Wrigley

I apologize. WordCamp Asia. 

Rahul Bansal

WordCamp Asia

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, WordCamp Asia. Written on the screen right in front of me. Yeah, you’re quite right. Thank you. 

So, and the last few that I want to mention, here’s another event happening in the WordPress space. This is the much talked about WordPress Accessibility Day. This is a 24-hour live event. So you can, you know, depending on where you are in the world, you might be able to consume bits. My understanding is all of the bits and pieces have been recorded. So rather than it being live, it’s being recorded so that the presenter gets the best version. However, 

Taco Verdonschot

Except for Q&A.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, Q&A and the chat is all going to be live. So the person who is speaking will be available for you live.  And I did a podcast episode with Dave, who’s in the comments, Dave and June. Dave and June joined me. I’m going to be putting that out on the Tavern this Wednesday. So hopefully you can learn about all the bits and pieces in the background. But yeah, that’s coming up. You can obviously register. Now, when I last looked, there were still some sponsor slots available, I think for bronze and micro, some of the smaller sponsor packages. So if you’re into that, go and check it out. You can see the link up here. Become a sponsor. You can check it out. No doubt Amber will have any something to say about that. Marcus says, what does he say?  Apologies. Oh, I’m so sorry, Rob. This is getting ridiculous.

Rob Cairns

It’s OK.

Nathan Wrigley

PressConf and leave the tickets have been available. Oh, apologies. OK, maybe it’s because they’re only available until tomorrow. I caught that sentence the wrong way round. So they’re available until tomorrow.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, which is the 30th of September for those not listening live.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, so you’ve got to rush on. If it’s past the 30th of September, you’ve missed out on that. But if you haven’t and you’re listening to it by tomorrow, you might still getting under the wire. That’s nice. Okay, thank you. Yay, says Amber. Show of hands. Woohoo. That’s great.  Okay, was that the last eventy thing? Yes, I think it was. So let’s quickly return to this one.  You sent me this in the link in a private chat a minute ago.

Taco Verdonschot

It responds to Nick’s article that we’ll talk about.

Nathan Wrigley

In which case, we will go to Nick’s article in that case, and we’ll come back to this one in just a second. Right. Okay, we are, in fact, in that case, going to move on. This made a bit of a wave this week. I don’t know if you were on social media, but each week there’s one post from somebody somewhere that seems to get all the hotness and all the buzz. And this week it was this one. 

Iconick, very nice, very clever. This is Nick Hamze. I’m going to pronounce it that way. Apologies, Nick, if I butchered your name. Nick has a blog post. I love this site, by the way. I think it’s really kind of retro cool. And this is now the second time I’ve seen this font. And I want to know what it is. I think it’s very cool. I like all the bits like the little kink in the D there. Anyway, Nick has penned a post called why WordPress lost the cool kids and how to win them back. Now, first of all, are we all in agreement? Did WordPress lose the cool kids? Show of hands on the panel. Let’s go back to the do you think we lost the cool kids?

Taco Verdonschot

Ages ago.

Nathan Wrigley

Ages ago. 

Rob Cairns

Ages ago.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay. Have we admitted to ourselves that 21-year-olds are not that bothered about WordPress? I could be wrong. Initiatives like WP Campus Connect doing great work, making sure that, you know, that the young people of this world are getting a chance. WP Campus as well. But if I put my children who are kind of, I think, really in the targets of Nick Hamze here, they take one look at WordPress and they’re like, who wants a blog? Who needs a website? 

I’ll just go and use, I’ll use Twitter, I’ll use Facebook, I’ll use whatever the cool thing at the moment is. The idea of owning your own content is kind of so like, oh, you’re a 1990s dad. We don’t care. It’s all disposable. Until, of course, they suddenly realize one day, oh, I got locked out of the platform. Anyway, the point that Nick is trying to make is that WordPress is no longer cool with the kids. And he really is talking about kids. He says the following. 

WordPress runs 43% of the internet, but try mentioning it in a design Discord and watch the cringe reactions. While WordPress quietly powers the New York Times and Microsoft, design Twitter celebrates every exodus to Webflow like it’s a prison break. And he says that WordPress is no longer cool because of 1000 paper cuts. 

But here’s some of them. The PHP stigma. Okay. that hurts. Interface chaos. Okay, that’s probably true. The accessibility curse, I wasn’t sure what he meant here because I’m going to read it. WordPress made web design democratic, which is incredible, but in creative communities, accessible gets read as amateur rather than powerful. I didn’t know what he meant there. 

Amber, can you shed some light on that? And the security perception, go on, Taco.

Taco Verdonschot

I’d say that the accessibility curse is the right heading, but with the wrong explanation in this case. because whereas he says accessibility isn’t perceived as cool, I think that it would be much cooler if we actually did accessibility better?

Nathan Wrigley

Okay.

Taco Verdonschot

Because then we wouldn’t have to talk about it so much.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, from what he said, it felt like when people talked about accessibility, they thought that wasn’t cool. So maybe I’ve just paused it incorrectly. Okay. And then the security problem, you know, if you’ve been in the WordPress space, all of those have been a part of your life for the last 10 years. It’s, you know, PHP, the interface is a hot mess and it’s getting more messy perhaps.

We’ve got this accessibility thing and then security perception as well. And then people like Webflow and Framer come along, chuck the billion dollars that they have at their, that’s an exaggeration. I have no idea how much money they have, but they certainly do a cool job of marketing themselves out there online. 

You know, they’ve got the slick videos, They do the TikTok and all of those things. And they just do a really good job. They professionally market themselves. Their assets look amazing. They’ve built communities and they are bragging about their tech stack. And so basically saying, you know, we’re in trouble. But then he offers us a way to fix it. 

He says we can fix the interface. We can integrate with design tools, which are cool already, like Figma and Sketch and things like that. We can write about success stories. We can embrace the new technical narrative about things like the REST APIs and all the cool things that graduates out of university are probably going to want to play with more than PHP. And we can keep building our community. This actually resonated with me. I don’t know if you got offended by it or thought that he was wider than Mark, but yeah, over to you guys.

Rob Cairns

Two things I’d like to jump in. First of all, the security perception. I think, and I’ve said this and I’ll say this again, is security all comes down on trust. So if you’re having problems in a WordPress ecosystem with sketchy plugins, then I think you have to, as a designer and developer, weed out what you’re using. It’s a trust factor. That’s #1. Number 2, the marketing of WordPress, I think, is why we’ve lost the cool kids. 

And it was a big discussion on X, and I think you saw, Taco, where we were talking about marketing and marketing in the community. Guess what, folks? We don’t need to market to the WordPress community. We need to market to the people outside the community. Marketing to ourselves is not good for the project. Bringing other people in is. And I kind of attribute this to where before I got into tech and marketing, I was very much a programmer. And I programmed in an old school language called COBOL, which is, again, not the cool language, but powers 75% of the financial systems in the world too.  So I think that’s where we’re at kind of.

Nathan Wrigley

Is it a case, though, that you can never be cool for a long period of time? So let’s take the music industry, right?

Rob Cairns

Yes.

Nathan Wrigley

If you’re born in the 1960s and you were into the Beatles and the Stones, like fabulous, everybody loved it all, then you go forward 10 years, the generation growing up, they’re not interested in the Beatles and the Stones. And it doesn’t matter how hard the Beatles and the Stones try to make themselves cool, they’re now not cool. So maybe there is something in that, there’s just this cyclical nature to the way these things work. 

Technologies have a legacy. It’s going to be difficult for WordPress to step out of that. Maybe this is, I don’t know, if there’s anything in what I’ve just said, but Tammie, it is. I take it, I take it on the chin. She says, maybe if we want to be cool, we should stop saying the TikTok. 

I do it deliberately, Tammie. I do it so that I am not cool. The TikTok. You notice I put my hands up as well. Okay, any thoughts on that apart from Rob, who’s obviously chimed in? What do you think, Taco? What do you think, Rahul?

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, I like the discussion on X as well. And I think that Mark Wilkinson asked a good question in the comments. He says, who is we and we need to market. And I think that is where the biggest problem is, that we need to define who we is, because right now what we see in WordPress is that the companies marketing WordPress are marketing their own solutions.

Every hosting company has their own WordPress solutions. And implicitly, we all market WordPress, but we’re also heavily competing. And there’s no, I mean, as much as I love the people on the WordPress marketing team, I think it’s the team that’s been dissolved most often in WordPress’s history. And that is problematic. We need to have a strong foundation that has funds and has a marketing budget. And we probably spend the money that the WordPress Foundation gifted to the Internet Archive a lot better on doing proper marketing for WordPress.

Nathan Wrigley

So the marketing, I remember a quote, sorry, I’m muddling my sentences up a bit here.

I remember a quote and it was from Bill Gates. Now you may or may not like Bill Gates, but he was actually quite good at what he did. And he was asked once, what would he do if he only had a dollar left in his pocket? He said, what would you spend it on? And he said, marketing that was to him, it doesn’t matter how cool your product is, unless people know about it, you have no product, essentially, if there’s nobody to purchase it and buy it. And we are in such a curious position in the WordPress space at the moment in that, you know, we’ve got hurdles that we have to jump over if we wish to use the word WordPress. I guess that’s part of the puzzle, you know, that people are trying to be very cautious about that.

But also, there’s no, if you’re in a marketplace, let’s say hosting, you work for a host company, it’s hard for you to give over loads of your column inches to WordPress. You’re just going to be talking about the features and the benefits of your hosting platform. WordPress is not really the bit that you want to talk about. You might sort of add it, you know, oh yeah, and it bolts onto WordPress. But it feels like some percentage of all of the marketing that goes on in the WordPress space, if we could crowbar a bit of WordPress into that, would be a cheap way of doing it.

But I guess what Nick is saying is that really, we need to actually put our money where our mouth is. There’s a whole other marketing in WordPress conversation that went on this week that I didn’t really get into. But thank you, Taco. Rahul, anything for you?

Rahul Bansal 

Yeah, so we face the PHP part quite strongly because we hire a lot of college students. So the WordPress is something they haven’t heard much at their age or their exposure level, but the PHP is something they dread upon. And so how would I put like, and when you say PHP, it’s not like they’re always looking or competing with React or something like the modern tech. There’s always something changes like from last two years, this is AI and machine language wave. So it’s not about WordPress or web anymore. They want to build machine learning platforms, something like they want to work for companies who are building expertly for AI. So WordPress gets hammered across different ways, not just the PHP as a language, but also tech trends. So whenever a new trend rises, it actually makes the distance bigger.

Nathan Wrigley

It’s kind of interesting. So you can judge by the amount of comments that are coming in. I don’t know if you 3 can see the comments coming in, but some pieces that we talk about don’t get much commentary. This one’s had quite a few, so it’s obviously pushing some buttons. So let’s just go to a few of them because it’s kind of interesting. So here we go.

I’ll just make that so sorry, Rob. It did lose the cool kids. But some are coming back and new ones are arriving. I hope that’s true. I would love that to be the case. Obviously, Nick is somewhat skeptical that we’re at that crossroads quite yet. Tammie says, sketch is not cool. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder is all I’ll say. Some people love it, I’m sure. And then so devs and amateurs can use WordPress. Right, we’ve done the one about Mark, which says, who is the we that we need to market to? Yes. No idea. When you’ve got 43% of the web trying to distill who your target market is, isn’t it just everybody? It’s really, it’s kind of really hard to zone in on who they are. But I suppose in this case, it’s everybody under the age of 30, which is only about, what, probably 3 billion at this point, something like that. It’s quite a big audience. Paul, hello, Paul. I don’t know that we’ve met, but Paul Buncombe joining us. I thought this was a great post, he says.

But the examples given of technology that have changed their perception didn’t include any that have fallen out of favor and risen again. Okay, interesting. Yeah, good point. And maybe Tammie’s making the same point that the post uses dated terms. And I think that’s probably it. No. I keep hearing that we need to market WordPress, says Mark, and lots of talk about amazing videos from the likes of Framer, et cetera.

But who does that for WordPress? Who pays for it? Yeah, this is the point, right? Who would pay for that? It would need to be, can you imagine the cost of those Framer, Webflow videos, Squarespace, Wix. My understanding is the Squarespace team, isn’t it? Somewhere in the region of, no, maybe it’s Wix. Anyway, one of those platforms has got something in the region of 400 full-time employees just on the marketing side of things. And their budget is many, many, many, many millions. I don’t know how you compete against that, Juggernaut. That is truly a difficult thing.

Taco Verdonschot

Well, by not giving away 100 grand to another organization instead of spending it on marketing.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay. To expand that, because I kind of didn’t follow. What did you mean? Sorry.

Taco Verdonschot

So I think it was late last year, the WordPress Foundation posted that they had done a 100 grand donation to the Internet Archive.

Nathan Wrigley

I see.

Taco Verdonschot

And what if we had used that money to market WordPress or even to pay developers to work on WordPress full time?

Nathan Wrigley

Did we just get lucky with WordPress? What I mean by that is did it kind of market itself? Because there was a bunch of people who were just willing to jump on board that ship. They could see the utility in volunteering their time for something that they would put in a bit of time, but out of it with all the combined time would come out something way better than the amount of time that they put in. So, I contribute, I don’t know, let’s say that I did 3 hours a week.

But if lots of people are doing 3 hours a week, out comes this brilliant piece of software, which then I can use. My 3 hour a week investment is time, money, well spent. And it had that kind of open source vibe that the early internet did. And now we’ve moved into a, you know, really different time where the internet is definitely a bunch of walled gardens and stuff. So I don’t have the answer to it, but what would be nice is if somebody who is, I don’t know, let’s say a trillionaire just comes over to us all and says, look, there’s a couple of billion. Use that to market WordPress. That’d be nice.

Taco Verdonschot

Yes and no. I’d rather have a sustainable system where we get a lot less money every year, but it is recurring and we can keep it up forever than a one-time huge donation.

Let’s build an ecosystem where talking about making money doesn’t scare half the community away. Because I think that is still one of the challenges that we have in WordPress is that making money is a little bit dirty. You can’t really talk about it and we should. Because if people don’t make money, how are they going to invest into the system? How are they going to invest their time?

Nathan Wrigley

So this is an interesting comment from Corey. I’m not sure which Corey, but hello, thank you. Does it matter though, if Framer is cooler, if no one is getting six to seven figure projects for a Framer website? Yeah, interesting point. I don’t know if that’s the case. I feel like Webflow has only recently started to take on six-figure, high six-figure projects. This is more in Rahul’s wheelhouse than mine being that he’s, you know, leading up a WordPress agency, which is at the enterprise level. Corey carries on. This just feels like the evolution of a maturing platform. Not to say we don’t have problems. Interesting. Anything to say, Rahul, or shall we knock on that?

Rahul Bansal

Like every time any of something like Webflow or some of these kind of company starts their marketing or outreach partnership team usually approach all the large WordPress agencies like the special enterprise space. So I really never took on any Webflow lead. So I don’t have the idea about their mathematics, but we’re happy with our side of math. In fact, we are growing with WordPress and like it might sound more philosophical, but I believe in infinite game, we don’t have to do anything. The closed source will die eventually.

Eventually they will have to pay the investor back. Then they will start squeezing their customers, keep rising the price, and then we will get more Webflow to WordPress migration projects. So in a way, I thank them because now I have, they’re consolidating my future user base. Five years later, probably I will have 50 Webflow to WordPress migration project in six figures.

Nathan Wrigley

Nice, yeah. I think essentially Nick has just sort of encapsulated a hot bottom topic and he’s managed to do it and everybody kind of stuck in. It’s an age-old thing. I think maybe there’s lessons to be learned from things like the Drupal project. Drupal have this system, which is a little bit like Five for the Future, but it’s much more you do A and you get B as a result. So in other words, if you do this checklist of things, then you can, I don’t know, for example, appear at events and what have you.

Obviously, as a sponsor, as the person putting in that money, that may not be something that you want, but at least there’s a flow of money going directly in. And then, the marketing team might be something that is prioritized. But the consensus that I was seeing on Twitter, for those people who decided that we needed to work more hard on marketing, it all came down to where’s the money coming from. And if that money’s not earmarked at some point, then marketing is going to be difficult not impossible.

WordPress itself, I think, stands on its own 2 feet. But, you know, if you can throw a lot of money at marketing, you’ll probably have a greater reach. Whether or not, you know, that’s ideal, I don’t know. Taco, it looks like you were about to…

Taco Verdonschot

Well, I was considering if I should bring it up, but I think having spent some time with Linux Foundation projects, I think they have a model that works quite well to have open source projects that actually have financial stability.

Nathan Wrigley

Do they have more specific rules around the way that money is gathered in and spent? I confess, I don’t know anything about the Linux Foundation, really.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah. So the way it works for a lot of Linux Foundation projects is that you have a board of companies that will advise the technical leadership of the open source project. And in order to be on that board, you have to be a member of both the Linux Foundation and that specific project. And there’s a cost involved.

Nathan Wrigley

It’s kind of interesting because in the WordPress community, I imagine there’d be a lot of pushback of that, wouldn’t there? Because you’d have the people representing the companies on the one hand who would probably love that, and then you’d have a whole load of individual contributors and what have you. You’d probably think, wait, hang on, how is that all going to work out? And how are my hands going to be tied and rah rah rah?

Taco Verdonschot

No

Nathan Wrigley

No, OK.

Taco Verdonschot

This is, for example, what we’re doing with FAIR. It’s also a Linux Foundation project, and it’s also set up in a way that the technical steering committee directs the direction of the project. But there’s an advisory committee that’s formed as soon as it has members, etc. that will advise the technical steering committee on, hey, if you want to make this decision, this is the impact on the business side of the project. So it’s really going hand in hand. And it’s not that you’re surrendering any autonomy or any authority to whatever company. In fact, this system makes sure that there will never be a single person or company in charge of your entire project.

Nathan Wrigley

Interesting. Okay, thank you for those insights. Now, because time is moving on, I think we should probably press on, but just to let you know that Nick Hamze on his website, he does offer what he feels are some solutions, and they are basically fix the interface, integrate with design tools. 

I did mention some of these, but we’ll do it again. Create new success stories, embrace the technical narrative, and build community around creation. It was the hot topic of this week, so just head over to Twitter, and no doubt if you use the hashtag WordPress, this will crop up for you and you too can get stuck into it in the way that I did. Now this then presumably was the piece that you were trying to bind to that one. Do you want to just quickly dig into this or is that what you just said?

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, some of it. So Joost makes a slightly larger argument that we need both a product and a marketing team and not just a marketing team like we just talked about.

Nathan Wrigley

Can I just say that on this, I’ve often seen, Joost’s face highlighted and then your face is highlighted when you do your posts and Marieke as well. I’ve yet to see a post by the bird.  I’m waiting for the bird to write about. I’m fascinated. I’m guessing it’ll be something to do with Twitter.

Taco Verdonschot

Actually, so this is the outside of our office building.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, it’s nice. It’s lovely. It’s very nice. Okay, let’s move on. Okay, repository. We know Rae. Rae writes a lot about bits and pieces, and she’s got her take on this as well. She goes into great, great depth, so you can read all about that. I’m going to, what am I going to do? I’m very quickly, I’m not going to labor on this. And I don’t know the background, but we never like to talk about when people are laid off. It’s never a good thing in the WordPress space. But over at Fueled, there seems to be a discussion that I don’t quite know how this story arose. 

It seems like this story is preempting. the possibility that people are going to be laid off. Certainly some way through this post, it seems that the author who wrote this was suggesting that they had advanced information. I don’t quite know how that would be. But 10up amalgamated with Fueled, a digital agency, a couple of years ago, I’m going to say something like that. 

And it would appear from this piece at least, is that maybe that hasn’t worked out for the best. The reasons are listed down below. It’s speculation, I would say. This isn’t coming from either Fueled or 10up, but it would seem that there’s maybe been a sort of clash of cultures, let’s put it that way. The things that Fueled did best weren’t necessarily the way that 10up did things best, and perhaps this is a consequence of that. 

Obviously, it goes without saying that if you are affected by this, I do wish you the best, and I hope that you managed to find some work. On that bombshell, we’ll go to this one. It’s a pretty poor segue, but there you go. I hope that’s all right. Because you over at rtCamp, Rahul, I believe it’s true to say that you’re constantly looking for developers. Is that true? Did I read it somewhere that there’s like basically never a period where you’re not looking for?

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, we’re always hiring.

Nathan Wrigley

And go on, sorry, you carry on.

Rahul Bansal 

So the thing is that so first, like our work culture and like a lot of internal structuring is very different. So we always look out for people, we scan them. So I would say we are always hiring, we’re always accepting application. The response time varies between one week to one month.

That’s the only slide factor that changes with the demand. But we’re always hiring, like we’re always accepting application. In fact, this is our new site. On old site, we used to have waitlist features. So no job was ever closed. People can always, how would I put like, so if they say a job is closed, they can get on the waitlist. As soon as we have a demand, we will shoot them e-mail.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, I see. So you’re sort of like, okay, yeah, just keep me on file, basically. Okay, that’s interesting. So this is careers.rtcamp.com. And you can obviously filter by the different bits and pieces. I’m showing that there are two jobs available, for example, in the engineering facility at the moment, but 12 in total, two in design. I don’t know what is this word, Frappe? I don’t know what that is. Forgive me. But anyway, there we go. You can see the different bits and pieces there. Okay, right, let’s move on. We really are running out of time. Oh, it’s this. You mentioned this over here over on Twitter, our recent FRAP hiring announcement is just the opening up. So what is Frappe, Rahul?

Rahul Bansal

So it’s an open source framework, something which was inspired by WordPress, but it is more useful to create business applications or any kind of data-driven application. So Frappe is more like Laravel. On Frappe, they have something like ERPNext. The goal of ERPNext is to be the WordPress of ERP world. And we started with ERPNext as our own internal business operating system. 

That is what I have mentioned that in rtCamp, layoffs are extremely layered because we are super data-driven. We do the math very well. So every time we make an offer, we literally keep two years payroll in mutual funds aside.

Nathan Wrigley

Nice.

Rahul Bansal

For each of our employees, we have like a two years’ salaries deposited in banks.

Nathan Wrigley

Nice. So if you get a job over there, you’re in good position.

Rahul Bansal

Not a single layoff of any, say, 16 years.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, wow. Good grief. That’s quite a statistic. Okay, in that case, I’m going to reintroduce you to this page careers.rtcamp.com. Go check it out. That’s phenomenal.

Taco Verdonschot

I mean, Nathan, you were at WordCamp Asia where rtCamp was one of the sponsors, right?

Nathan Wrigley

It was, yeah.

Taco Verdonschot

I mean, have you met anyone on their team who’s not awesome?

Nathan Wrigley

No, not yet.

Taco Verdonschot

Same.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, that’s going to be our quest to find somebody on the rtCamp team who is not awesome. Oh, that’s lovely. What a lovely, lovely story that is. And if you get a job there, you’ve got two months of, two years of salary banked already. Okay, apropos, oh, let’s move to this one quickly, because we are running out of time. 

I didn’t, I think this is new. I got some confirmation that this was new by some of the guests when we just did the little preamble talk before the show started. Shopify have launched a plugin. Obviously, if you’re selling things online, the traditional way of doing that would be some WordPress plugin. 

Perhaps WooCommerce is the most common way of doing it. But we do know that a lot of clients like to go to Shopify. Well, you can now integrate that with a couple of blocks inside your WordPress site. There’s a plugin which will enable you to build different bits and pieces in WordPress. Honestly, I’ve got nothing more to say about it than that. It exists. It may be that, you know, you can bolster your WordPress solution without the need to stretch over to WooCommerce.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, I’m really interested in seeing what this will mean for the future of WooCommerce.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, I mean, it’s a big play, right? It’s a small launch with just a couple of blocks. But they’re building, well, a product which is, I don’t know, I was on the London Underground this week. I don’t know if you saw any of them, Taco.  There were tons of Shopify adverts all over the place. 

Those ads, they are not cheap. And there were many, many of them. So here we come to marketing again. You know, you stick an advert on the London Underground and suddenly, you know, you’re finding 10s of millions of people who probably 99.9% of them would have no interest. But look at the power of what they’re doing. They get in front of people. 

And now apparently, you can do your Shopify itinerary and checkout process and all of that inside of your WordPress site with a plugin. Beyond that, I don’t know if anybody else has had a play yet, but it’s there. Okay, let’s move on. There it is. Next one then.

Rahul Bansal

That cool kids are moving to WordPress in a way.

Nathan Wrigley

Say that, say again, sorry.

Rahul Bansal

So with Shopify taking WordPress seriously, finally we can say some cool kids are taking WordPress seriously.

Nathan Wrigley

So there’s an interesting talking point, right? Would it, I wonder if it’ll swell WordPress numbers. Because you can do things, obviously, if you want a blog or something like that, I imagine the Shopify constraints are pretty great around that kind of thing. And if you just want a website with contact forms and all that kind of stuff, WordPress is guaranteed to be better than Shopify, I would imagine in that scenario. So I wonder if it will draw people in. 

I’d be also curious to see how much they promote it outside of the WordPress space. Obviously, they’re doing it here. But whether or not they’ll, talk about this on their Tube adverts, I’m not quite so sure. Time will tell. Okay. Righty-ho. Okay. It never stops though, does it? So we’ve got one thing on the Shopify side and now we’ve got this on the WooCommerce side. 

Again, I think this is new. WooCommerce now offers you the availability to do POS, point of sale. You can do card payments from what looks like a mobile phone app. As simple as that, I mean, obviously we’re looking at the example here. You’ve seen this a million times over you, haven’t you? Somebody deploying a mobile device or an iPad or something like that to do the checkout process. You go up to the counter, something gets scanned.

Well, yeah, look, here they are, a couple of links to the Apple iOS, the App Store, but also the Google Play Store and now you have the solution available to you. It does say it’s currently only available in the UK and the US, but yeah, what more can you say? So on the one hand, Shopify’s eating WooCommerce’s lunch, on the other hand WooCommerce fighting back with Android and iOS apps to make it possible to all of that.

Rob Cairns

Nathan, two cents here going back to the cool kids whole discussion. If you want to be a cool kid, you’ve got to be first to market. And I’m sorry, WooCommerce is way behind in this space. PayPal’s already been there, Square by Jack Dorsey’s already been there. There’s multiple other platforms. And I think I hate to direct this conversation back there, but if we want to keep being that cool product, we got to be back on the frontend of this stuff.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, I think I, when I, don’t know if you noticed in the show notes that I put, I wrote something to that effect. I put something like, you know, I wonder if this is too late or, you know, something like that. 

Rob Cairns

I think so. 

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I really, I think I’ve been able to do this with, something like Stripe or what have you for the longest time, but obviously it would have bound to WooCommerce.

Rahul has disappeared. Let’s hope his internet connection is staying around. But whilst he’s not here, I think we should mention this because he probably would be embarrassed. Yeah, look, Deveden says, I see a lot of awards behind Rahul in the camera back. Yeah, they are legit awards. 

He is like, you know, he’s an an A1 enterprise agency and he runs that. And I think, wow, he’s quite the person to have on the show. It’s pretty amazing. Okay, so maybe we’re late to the party there. 

Mark Westguard was in the comments earlier. I hope that he forgives me for saying this. Mark, way above my pay grade here. I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re on about. I do kind of. He’s written a tutorial and it is that. 

So I’m just mentioning it. He’s written a tutorial about how you can create an MCP server in WordPress with the abilities API and the MCP adapter. So the idea being that you can combine AI with the abilities API, which I don’t know, for example, the ability might be create a blog post or create a user or something like that. 

And that sort of stuff is really difficult to do. And Mark has explained in this tutorial how to do it. I won’t go into the nuts and the bolts of how to do that. Welcome back, Rahul. I hope that, I hope all is well. Sometimes these things happen. Okay, so there we go. That’s that. Anything want to say? Anybody want to say anything?  But I’m so conscious that we’ve got almost no time left. Okay, great. I’m going to quickly move on. This one.

Taco Verdonschot

Marked in a nice TLDR in the comments, by the way.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh. Mark Westguard, there we go. Oh, and now it’s Rahul’s face that’s getting wiped out. It’s not Rob anymore. Oh, sorry, Rahul. 

TLDR, says Mark Westguard, the creator of the article we’ve just put up there, how to get AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude to safely interact with WordPress. Thank you. You’ve summarized it lots better than I did, which is great because you wrote it. 

I’ve read it. I’ve read every word, but I was trying to figure out how to say it in 12 sentences and there wasn’t an easy way. Thank you. Just flipping back just for a moment, SinanWP, says, Shopify is an insanely expensive solution. And the more you scale, the more, okay, it gets to unlike WooCommerce. I did not know that.

Rob Cairns

So hang on a sec. I would humbly disagree with a bit of that comment. If you’re WooCommerce, store scaling, your hosting has to scale. So let’s watch where we put our dollars. It’s where you want to put your money and how you want to do it. I’m not I’m not supporting Shopify. I’m just saying the obvious. We’ve got to. People don’t think of stuff that way and we’ve got to start to think that way.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, the graph curves upwards regardless of which platform you’re using. But I suppose you have to do it.

Rob Cairns

Exactly.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, see, which way the graph curves for both of those things. Okay. And thank you, Mark, for explaining that in a very, very thrifty way. Right. Okay. The next one. This is so great. Let’s hope this and it’s kind of blanked itself out. I don’t know if we, oh, there we go. You can see it now. 

So this is the demo of 2.1 version of the Blocks Accessibility Checks plugin. Maybe this is really old hat and I’ve never come across it, but I’ve never seen this before. So let me just click play. I’ll just scrape back a little bit. So imagine you’re in a post and you, I don’t know, you’re dropping in paragraphs and images. It’s very limited at the at the moment, I think it only works with headings, paragraphs and images, something like that. But you drop in, let’s say, oh, and buttons. You drop in a button and it will immediately in real time give you feedback about the accessibility of where you are at right now. So in this case, the message being read is buttons are required to have a link. Well, yeah, that button will have a link, but it hasn’t yet. And so the plugin is kind of intercepting and saying, okay, get on with it, make us a link. And then you can imagine what happens.  You put in a link, that nag goes away, and a different one would come up. 

And so this video then shows you, for example, problems that you might have with tables, problems that you might have with buttons, problems that you might have with text, with images. And I just think this is such a clever way of surfacing the problems as you begin to type the problem, as you solve them, the problems go away. New ones are ingested and displayed in front of you. And I just think this is really cool. Amber, please tell me I’m wrong. If there’s some problem here, let me know. But it seems like the first steps into what I think is a very, very interesting workflow for solving accessibility problems.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, and now let’s imagine a future where we combine this with the comments on the block so that you can get a suggestion that you can actually respond and have a chat on a possible solution. And then you combine it with Mark’s MCP and you can have AI respond to your comments and solve these problems for you.

Nathan Wrigley

And WordPress is cool again.

Taco Verdonschot

It is.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah. We just figured out how to make WordPress cool. It is cool. Oh, look, as if that happened at the same time. It is cool, says Amber. She must have written that about 15 seconds ago because there’s a bit of a lag, but that coincided beautifully. We’ve talked about doing this too.

Yeah, Amber, when I watch this workflow and I see that, you put a link in and that thing just disappears and you move on to the next thing and the things don’t get listed before they’re needed, it’s just really, really clever. A beautiful UX, basically. So let’s hope that project. get some traction. It is called Block Accessibility Checks and it’s only available for core blocks and only a few of them right now. There’s a little UI where you can toggle things on and off in the background. So that’s one thing.

Another plugin I wanted to mention was this. I have wanted this in my life, it turns out forever, but never knew it until this week. It’s the ability to simply bookmark something inside a WordPress. Maybe this exists, maybe somebody’s done this already, but I haven’t seen it. So for example, I don’t know, you want to say, I keep coming back to this page. And because I’ve got 900 pages on my website and I can’t remember what the heck I called it and everything’s organized alphabetically, I can’t ever find it. 

Well, now you can. You just star a bunch of things, posts, pages, whatever. And now it’s bookmarked. So you can come back to it and say, okay, there it is. So I thought that was quite cool. It’s just called Admin Bookmarks. And it just does that one thing. Very nice. Moving on. This is, I don’t know if this is good or not. 

Amber, again, from the accessibility point of view, you can tell me, maybe this destroys accessibility, I’m not sure. It’s a plugin called BlaBlaBlocks Formats. Great name, by the way, love it. And it enables you to do all these funky different ways of highlighting text, curly, underline, crossed out, strike, and so on. That’s what that does, thought I’d mention that. 

And then lastly, just because he’s awesome. Justin Tadlock has created a Breadcrumbs block, which does exactly that. It enables you to drop in a block and it will tell people where they are in the sort of the breadcrumb nature of your website. So you can go and check that out as well. 

And we had absolutely loads more. We had Telex to talk about. I was going to show you this fun thing, which enabled you to get really annoyed with captures. That was fun. We were going to talk about e-mail being launched as a CloudFlare service in private beta. We were going to, we were going to do, should we just quickly, have you all got a minute? 

Very quickly. Jono Alderson has done what I consider to be some epic work. He’s it’s so good. And can you imagine how many hours he sunk into this just because he was able to put the word Impo in front of Lighthouse. So he’s created Impolighthouse. And basically it’s like a it’s like a full on legit Lighthouse replacement, only it’s really mean. It’s just really rude. It’s deliberately rude. So there are various levels. You get the idea. You put in a URL and you want some Lighthouse feedback, as you might. You can then choose a level of annoying. The first one is irritated, which is what I used. You can go for silly, which they call Monty Python. And apparently Taco’s tried this out. You can go for scathing, which is called nuclear. Is it pretty brutal?

Taco Verdonschot

Yes.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay. I just went for irritated. And this is the kind of feedback that you get. So it’s a bit, so normally you just get your metrics and it’d be making nice, polite suggestions. This just leans in on meanness, which is just so funny. This site behaves apparently like an organization that’s given up on its users. Critical basic decisions, avoiding pointless redirecting chains and limiting third-party JavaScript haven’t been fixed, which means the team either can’t or won’t prioritize, simple high impact improvements and it goes on. And I would like to applaud anybody who makes anything on the internet which is funny. And that. Presumably that’s all this is.

Taco Verdonschot

So the thing is, if you’ve ever met Jono, you can only read this with his voice in the back of your head. There’s only one way.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah. I’ve never, I don’t think I’ve ever, I’ve met Jono in that I’ve been watched his presentations. Jono, is it Jono? Jono talks at the speed of light. Is that, are we talking?

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, 

Nathan Wrigley

About the same Jono. So I’m imagining that if somebody else was to build this, it’d probably take like a week. I reckon Jono probably did it in like 8 minutes or something. If he types at the speed that he talks.

Taco Verdonschot

Yep, that’s not unlikely.

Nathan Wrigley

But I absolutely love it. It’s really, really good. And here we go, a little comment from Rhys. Hello, Rhys. I mean, Jono yelling at you for being useless is pretty much part of the course. Okay. And Amber says, yes, I was definitely hearing his voice. So bravo, Jono. Go and check it out. It is at the johnoalderson.com website and I will link to it in the show notes, but it’s basically jonoalderson.com forward slash Impolighthouse.  Whether or not it actually has useful nuggets of information in there, I do not know.

Taco Verdonschot

It does.

Nathan Wrigley

But it will certainly make you laugh, which is kind of the main point, I guess. Okay, we were going to talk about Matt Mullenweg and listening to music as you play websites. We were going to talk about this SpamGPT tool, but time has run away with us, so we will not. We will save those for another week. I know. 

That’s how it goes. So that was This Week in WordPress episode 350. It featured Taco, the Don Shot. It featured Rahul Bansal, and it featured Rob Cairns and myself, Nathan Wrigley. We’ll be back. We’re back all the time. There’s never a Monday that goes by where we’re not back.

Well, unless it’s Christmas or something like that, or I’m on a plane, then we’re not here. But every other week we’ll be back. So we’ll be back next week. But before we go, we have to do the slightly humiliating hand wave. Rahul’s going, what What the heck? We do this. What? We do that. 

There we go. That’s all that I require. We do it so that I can make the album art. Any suggestion? Did anybody think of anything that we could call this title? I’ve got written down here only one and it was the need to slim down. Taco said it at one point. And I thought that would apply to me beautifully. I need to slim down.

Taco Verdonschot

I feel seen as well.

Nathan Wrigley

So I’m going to go on a diet when this episode finishes. Right, that’s it. We’ll be back next week. You have a lovely time. The guests, if you want to stick around and have a chatter after this is done, that would be lovely. We like to do that as well. But see you next week, everybody. 

Take care. Bye.

Taco Verdonschot, Rahul Bansal and Rob Cairns

Bye.

Nathan Wrigley

Bye, bye, bye, bye.