Notas Interesantes

I’m really excited to introduce a project I worked on with various AI agents the other night, which I think represents a new way we might build things in the future.

First, the problem: My WordPress site has 5,600+ posts going back decades, and I had some categories that were old and I didn’t really use anymore, and I wasn’t happy with the structure. Every time I made a new post, it irked me a little, and I had this long-standing itch to go back and clean up all my categories, but I knew it was going to be a slog.

Let me present Taxonomist, a new open-source tool you can run with one copy-and-paste command line that solves this problem. Here’s the idea:

You run this code in your terminal, and it spins up a Claude Code instance that asks you for your URL.

Then it takes that and figures out what type of site you have, which APIs are available, and starts downloading all your posts locally for analysis.

Sub-agents analyze every post against your current categories and thinks about suggesting new ones.

It previews all the changes.

Tries a variety of ways to authenticate against your site and make all the changes.

Logs everything locally, so anything is reversible later.

THIS IS VERY ALPHA. PROBABLY BUGGY. BE CAREFUL WITH IT. PATCHES WELCOME. MAYBE MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR SITE BEFORE YOU CHANGE IT.

It kind of just worked. I ran it live against ma.tt and it cleaned up a ton of stuff pretty much exactly how I wanted. But there’s a lot of weird stuff happening here, so I don’t know quite what this is yet.

It’s very non-deterministic! There is some pre-written code, and probably could be more, but a lot of the code is generated on the fly by your agent. This creates interesting bugs where people testing with less powerful models had some odd behavior.

I kind of want a directory of these useful AI agents on WordPress.org, but also, there’s something a little strange about trusting a remote shell script to run on your machine.

I tested this with Claude, but there’s no reason Codex couldn’t use the repo in the exact same way, and I’d love to improve the quick start script to start by detecting all the agents you have, asking which you’d like to use, and also which directory you’d like to work in. I think we could kill the cd taxonomist-main && claude «start» part of it.

Because much of the code and commands are generated on the fly from prompts, it’s very resilient! I’ve seen people try it, and it ran into errors with libraries or whatever, but it just figured out how to work around them.

I’d love it if, at the end of every session, there was a moment for self-reflection where the agent would take the repository and suggest upstream issues and PRs based on anything that went wrong. Then this could recursively self-improve very quickly.

There are some obvious improvements to this, for example, doing this for tags. Sometimes it creates too many categories when you might only want 3-5 for your theme.

One fun thing is a bunch of the work of this just uses public WordPress APIs, so you can run it against any site! I like using distributed.blog as a demo. It’ll still do all the fun downloading and analysis and everything, you just won’t be able to make changes.

I now have a local cache of all my WordPress posts I can do other interesting things with, and that’s cool.

The logging and reverting probably still has some bugs in it.

You can riff with it along the way, so for example, it suggested I get rid of my Audrey category because it didn’t have enough posts, and I asked it to look at all the companies on Audrey.co website and categorize any posts that talk about them as Audrey, which created like 50 more.

I want to check the GitHub repo for any updates before it starts, and maybe periodically, because it’s iterating and improving really fast.

So, not sure what this is, but please check it out, play with it, submit improvements or ideas, and think about what’s next. Might host a Zoom or something to brainstorm.

Transcript
[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, WordPress content creation, education, and the unexpected diversion into a pizza plugin.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Elliott Richmond. Elliott’s been deep in the WordPress community for over 20 years, developing since the early days, back when WordPress was yet to be forked from b2. He’s freelanced, built with multiple CMS systems, and has contributed creatively to the community, including releasing a WordPress advent calendar way back in 2013.

He is an active WordPress developer, content creator on YouTube, and unexpectedly a part-time pizza vendor running a thriving pizza business powered entirely by WordPress tools.

Many listeners will know Elliott for his technical videos, but today we discuss how WordPress has served as the glue for unexpected ventures, like scaling a local pizza business during lockdown, using WooCommerce, Jetpack, and custom plugins. Elliott’s experience showcases just how flexible WordPress can be, whether for websites, unique ordering systems, or even streamlining business processes for other niches.

Recently, Elliott has been asked by Automattic to create content around wordpress.com, giving him early access to features, and allowing him to share his workflow and insights with a broader audience. He talks about his approach to content creation, balancing scripting versus improvisation, and details his low tech kit from iPhone cameras to DIY lighting.

Throughout the episode, Elliott shares how community connections and feedback loops, especially via YouTube comments, shape his work, and he discusses the new opportunities for content creators within the WordPress ecosystem.

If you’re interested in WordPress beyond websites, curious about how to turn technical, know-how into educational video content, or just want to hear about WordPress powered pizza, and who doesn’t, this episode is for you.

If you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Elliott Richmond.

I am joined on the podcast by Elliott Richmond. Hello Elliott.

[00:03:35] Elliott Richmond: Hello. How you doing? Thanks for having me.

[00:03:37] Nathan Wrigley: You’re so welcome. Elliott and I have had a little bit of a chat prior to hitting the record button.

Elliott’s one of those people who has been in my world for many years, because I’ve been vicariously watching what, this is going to sound a rather sinister. I’ve been watching what Elliott’s been doing for several years. And we’ll get into some of that in a moment. It’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast anyway. I feel like I know more about you than you will do about me, that’s for sure anyway. But welcome to the podcast.

[00:04:08] Elliott Richmond: Thank you. Yeah, thank you for having me. I think if you put yourself out there, you are bound to attract stalking of some form.

[00:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. Okay. I hope it doesn’t come across as that.

[00:04:18] Elliott Richmond: No, not at all. Not at all.

[00:04:19] Nathan Wrigley: But will you just give us a little bit of your background? Obviously this is a WordPress specific podcast, so you can dip into your early childhood if you like, but maybe if we constrain it to WordPressy things.

How long have you been using WordPress? What do you do at the moment? And then we can get into some of the fun things you’re going to be doing.

[00:04:36] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, sure. So I’ve been using, or developing with, wordPress for over 20 years. So pretty much as old as WordPress is, but I was developing before that, building stuff. I’m self-taught developer, but I was building stuff in the early nineties for bands and stuff that I was in, creating music and just putting stuff out on the web.

But then I realised, when I was working at an agency, it was a design agency, that there was definitely a market for the web effectively, but the company I was working for didn’t really want to get into it. So eventually when I went freelance, I was able to sort of self-teach myself all of the things I was interested in, which was web development. So I used all of the kind of CMSs like Joomla, Drupal, and eventually found b2 which was forked, ended up being WordPress.

So, yeah, started seeing lots of communities popping up, meetups and I just reached out to people. And I’ve actually featured on WP Tavern before because of releasing an advent calendar I think it was, back in 2013, I think it was Christmas time. And it was basically just reaching out to other developers and asking them for code snippets. It was back in the day when WordPress was kind of, it was a blog but developers were using it in really creative ways like portfolios, and product databases where you had to use the category and tagging system to actually make things work, and then manipulate the templates.

So there was lots of code snippets sort of flying about. So yeah, I just reached out to community and got about 30 developers submitting code, and then just released them as advent calendars.

So, today I am still a developer and develop for WordPress, very passionate about WordPress. I’m a content creator, create stuff on YouTube, and I’m also a part-time Pizzaiolo. And if you don’t know what that is, that’s basically somebody who makes pizzas.

[00:06:22] Nathan Wrigley: I can’t ignore that, and we’re going to get into that in a moment. But I’ve been having people on a variety of different podcasts for over a decade now, and you are the first, actually, that’s not true. I was about to say that you are the only person that I’ve ever interviewed who’s actually used b2 prior to it becoming WordPress. You are not, because I interviewed Matt Mullenweg once, and of course he, along with Mike Little, definitely used b2 because they forked it to become WordPress.

But that really does give me an illustration of, you are right at the beginning. So you were one of the kind of founding members of the community, if you like, and goodness only knows, I’m sure you had no anticipation of what it was going to become.

[00:07:02] Elliott Richmond: No, not at all. Yeah, Kubrick.

[00:07:05] Nathan Wrigley: Old school. If you know what Elliott’s talking about, you can join the, what’s the word for somebody who’s been around in the community for a really long time? Well, anyway, one of those.

So tell us a little bit about the pizza thing. I don’t want to dwell on it for too long, if you don’t mind, but this is such an interesting little story. And curiously, it does have a WordPress spin at the end. So yeah, make sure to get that in as well because that’s fascinating.

[00:07:28] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, so during COVID, during lockdown, my wife and I just started a pizza delivery thing. Because all the kind of delivery shops were closing down and we have a community in our village and it was like, they’ve tried my pizzas before. So we thought, well, we’ll just roll it out and set it up. And people were saying, yeah, send me a pizza. So we thought, okay, well we can sell them to the rest of the community as well. And it was just going to be a temporary thing. Five years later, we employ five staff and it’s still going strong and we sell it as a licence to other people.

But the WordPress thing is, I mean in a million years I wouldn’t know that I’d be doing this five years later, but it’s all because of WordPress that has allowed me to do this. You know, it uses all WordPress products, it’s WooCommerce, WordPress itself, and some Jetpack stuff with the WooCommerce app. It glues everything together and it helps us to run a sort of micro business like that. And what has turned into a weekend, temporary thing has turned into a full-time business. So, yeah, it’s a, I don’t know if I can tell you any more about it really.

[00:08:28] Nathan Wrigley: Well, you can, you mentioned that you’ve got a plugin that’s coming out fairly soon, aligned with people who wish to replicate your pizza business, but in their own locale.

[00:08:40] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, so to just give you the bigger picture, my wife is kind of like a bit of a marketing guru, and she sees opportunities where I can’t see them. She sees all the blind spots. So this whole model can be replicated by anybody. She didn’t force me, I was willing to do it, but she made me film all of my steps to make pizzas. So if you don’t know how to make pizza, there’s a full course to make it. There’s a whole module of the marketing that we use. There’s all secret little tips in there about doing stuff on social media, which I don’t do. My wife does all that.

But I’ve developed a plugin that works with WordPress and WooCommerce and it stitches everything together. So it’s got an ordering system, it’s got a slot system, it’s got a time-based system, so you can only put certain slots within certain times, and then it’s got a radius distance. So if you were outside of that radius based on your postcode, you can’t order pizzas, but you can collect them. And we do get people collecting from miles away that were passing last year, and they’ve driven a hundred miles to come down for the weekend because they’re passing to pick up a pizza. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe it. But I think the furthest somebody’s come is something like 120 miles. It’s crazy.

Yeah, so people have been in touch with me like from, last chap was in Norway asking about his, could he use it for his brother’s bakery? And I said, yeah, absolutely. So anything that’s got like a restricted delivery zone, and maybe you want to just do it at certain times, you can do it. But you don’t even need to use the slot system, but you can set the radius distance. So if you want to do local deliveries, you can set a four mile radius, five mile, ten mile, whatever you want to set. Anything is doable really. Yeah, you can use the plugin.

So that’s kind of like the freemium Pizza Pilot. And then there’s a Pro version that we actually will bundle with our licensees. And we’ve got, it’s not like a franchise, it’s, you know, they buy the whole model once, and then they get the plugin bundled in. And, yeah, I’m just kind of like fine tuning it so that I can manage it. So if pizza does take over my life, I’m still, got my foot in WordPress and developing this product. So I’m happy about that.

[00:10:37] Nathan Wrigley: That’s so interesting that you have WordPress as the sort of fulcrum of this entirely different side of your life, really. And it feels like it’s more than like a hobby project at the moment. It feels like it’s the underpinnings of a lot of what you do, albeit maybe the WordPress community don’t know about it.

But also curious that, and again, I might be reading between the lines, maybe you launch the pizza business and then kind of retrofit your procedures into your own dog fooding plugin, which now you are deciding to sell.

But the fact that the technology stack that you knew inside out was able to facilitate that, you know, and a website can handle things like geolocation, that a website can handle things like payment, and the ability to add ingredients and things like that. All of that enabled you to launch that business, which is just so interesting.

Because most people who use WordPress, I doubt ever have that experience in life. You know, maybe they’re building things for clients, or they try a little hobby project. But you’ve got, I don’t know, it just sort of perfectly slotted in and, well, serendipity seems like the right word. Everything just sort of seems to slot in perfectly, and how wonderful.

[00:11:46] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, I think it all kind of happened at the same time, because I just mentioned to Rachel about, you know, during lockdown these businesses are shutting down and people are going to pivot. Because I was talking to the WordPress community and they were talking about how their businesses were pivoting, like their restaurants. And I said, I could set this up as a website. So it all came together kind of all at once really.

One thing I’d have to say is that I like doing complex things with WordPress, and I’m really interested in the way that people do stuff with WordPress. So we have somebody that comes to our Meetup that is a gardener, and they come religiously to our Meetup. You’d think, well, why is a gardener coming to the Meetup? Well, it’s because they run their whole invoicing system and business, the gardening business, through WordPress.

So it’s like, oh, that’s interesting. So there’s so many different things you can do with WordPress. So the one thing I’m grateful for is all of my experience that WordPress has given me and the opportunities in terms of my career, being able to sell, you know, development packages to clients, and picking up complex jobs in that sense. Because without, it wouldn’t be the glue for the pizza thing, and it wouldn’t have happened that easily.

[00:12:49] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Genuinely, absolutely fascinating. I think we could probably do the entire podcast about that, but there is another story to tell. As I said, I’ve been looking at Elliott online for quite a while and then, I don’t know when it was, but it was certainly quite recently, we are recording this in March, 2026, quite recently that I learned that you are going to be working with Automattic. I don’t know if it’s for Automattic, but certainly for the wordpress.com side of things. I could spoil what you are doing and misrepresent what it is. Probably best to just hand it over to you, and tell us what this gig is, this project that you’ve got running through 2026.

[00:13:27] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, so I have to shout out to Michelle Frechette because she basically reached out to me and suggested an introduction with Stacey Carlson, who is Automattic’s Affiliate and Influencer Director. And she’s obviously picked up some of my videos and she just said to me that, do you fancy us sponsoring a video or two about wordpress.com and how I felt about Automattic products? I said, yeah, why not? I use them all the time, every day. So it’s definitely up my street.

So I put some stuff together and she basically just told me that the Automattic leadership team, which directly is Matt down, were broadly supporting content creators. So yeah, I was on board with it.

And my mind just went on overdrive. Basically, Stacey said to me, would you like to do this thing? And I was like, yeah. She said, okay, well, we’ll have a chat in a couple of days or whatever. And I was like, I put concepts together and I sent about three or four different ideas. And it was like, yeah, okay, let’s do this. And it’s basically how I use WordPress, what I did, the whole pizza thing, what I do from day to day.

And I put these videos together and then it created another opportunity and another introduction to a lady called Brit Solata, who’s head of Influence Marketing. Big inspiration for me is another guy called Jamie Marsland, who’s actually the head of the wordpress.com YouTube channel, because he basically raised his profile by using WordPress and turning hard concepts like using the Block Editor into really easy to understand videos.

And he had the genius idea of creating the speed challenge, which was kind of viral. Again, he lives down the road from me, believe it or not, less than five, six miles away. So there’s a funny story behind that. We’ve known each other for like 15 years, connected through social media and whatever channels there are that we used to use. And we actually met for the first time, face to face, at WordCamp Europe in Greece. And it always tickles me because the first thing he said is like, we’ve known each other for years, but this is the first time we’ve met, and we have to come over the other side of Europe. So it’s not great for our carbon footprint, which always makes me chuckle.

Yeah, he was a great inspiration. And since then we went out for a coffee or two and he inspired me really to start doing my YouTube stuff. And I think that’s really what got me recognised through Michelle, Stacy, and Brit. And then Britt suggested that we do something for the rest of this year. So I’m going to be doing videos about wordpress.com, what’s coming up.

WordPress has always been a moving target. It uses multiple different types of technology, right? So there’s always different things happening and changing. And with the advent of AI, there’s a lot of stuff coming into the whole project. So, yeah, that’s kind of where we’re at.

[00:16:09] Nathan Wrigley: I have a lot of questions around that actually. So the first thing I’m going to ask is, is the intention to make long form content, or are you hoping to make more short form content? And really behind that question is what you just said about the fact that WordPress is in a real period of flux. On the .org side, we’ve got WordPress 7 coming around, which is going to be transformational, but I also feel that any video that gets made to coincide with 7 is quickly going to go out of date because we’re in such a rapid period of flux.

So just conscious about that, really, whether or not the content that you are going to be creating, and forgive me for using this word, is more disposable, if you know what I mean? So the kind of content that you’ll throw together in the anticipation that in 4, 3, 2 months time, you might have to reshoot it again. So, yeah, just wondering what the constraints are on the kind of content that you’re going to be making?

[00:17:01] Elliott Richmond: There aren’t really constraints in that sense, but I think the whole nature of WordPress is ideal for that kind of scenario. So we are going to do long form content and then spinoff of that is going to be the short form as well, because you can just do that with the modern tech that you can use today anyway.

But yes, I think if you’re working in the Core team and you’re doing documentation, and it’s always been a thing, getting documentation out has always been a problematic thing. And if you’re working on something and you’re deep into it, it’s difficult to get that stuff out.

I think over the years it’s got better because you’ve got prominent people in Core, in the team, working at Automattic that are pumping stuff out. Justin Tadlock and the other chaps and Birgit is putting stuff out with Gutenberg Times and things like that. So it has got a lot better, but definitely there is an opportunity for content creators to fill a gap in terms of new things that are coming, what’s going to be changing.

And also the way that people consume that content because YouTube and all the social, other social platforms, not that they’re great, TikToks and all that, but there’s definitely an opportunity for that content to be absorbed by different people. So there’s definitely a gap there for content creators to make people aware about those changes and new developments that are coming to WordPress.

[00:18:22] Nathan Wrigley: I’m in the lucky position in that for this podcast there isn’t really a laundry list of things that I have to cover. It’s very much up to me what I wish to have on the podcast. So you are an example, you know, decided to do this, and here we are doing it.

But I did wonder if you were, you know, you mentioned some names there over at Automattic. I don’t know if there’s going to be some things that they will require you to do because that’s in line with what .com has just released or what have you. Or if you really are, you know, the reins are off, do what you like Elliott and just make sure that you post us and tell us what’s going on.

I’m imagining there will be some sort of guidance and, okay, this thing’s about to launch, it would be really welcome if you produce the piece of content explaining why we’ve done it, and how it works and so on.

[00:19:03] Elliott Richmond: There’s no guardrails in that sense. It feels very fluid and flexible. Yes, there are kind of like things, we’d love you to do this, and I’m more than happy to do that because it’s definitely on my street anyway.

The products that are sort of being talked about are products that I use every day, so it has synergy, you know? It’s not like I’m having to do something that I wouldn’t be comfortable doing. It’s stuff I love doing and I love teaching other people anyway. So in terms of that whole community thing, I think when communities come together, the most I get out of it is actually learning from other people, not just teaching them.

And actually just by teaching somebody, or telling somebody about something, they give you feedback and the feedback loop there is super important, especially for a project like WordPress. Without that feedback loop, potentially, it’s not going to be a thing that anyone will use anyway. So just by doing something with the community or publishing something is useful feedback.

There may be something that is sort of created and developed that I don’t necessarily agree with, but I can still put it out there, say whether I like it or don’t like it, and then ask somebody, you know, what’s your feeling? Have you used it? What’s your feedback? Get some comments. That is feedback. And that’s how you improve things.

[00:20:14] Nathan Wrigley: YouTube is a phenomenal feedback loop actually. I mean, I know you’ll probably be getting feedback from within Automttic and what have you as well, but I long for the comments on a WordPress blog to be like the comments on a YouTube video. It seems that everybody’s quite willing to get the keyboard out and hammer out thousands of replies on a YouTube video. It really does capture that.

And so, especially if during the content you provoke the audience to comment, and to give you feedback, because you may well be making another piece of content, which will be guided by the comments and what have you. I think it’s amazing for that. And kind of like pretty, pretty untapped. Usually when you watch content, it is just, okay, I’ve decided what I’m going to do. There it is. It’s an isolated, atomised piece of content. But the idea of going and asking for, what shall I do next? Or something akin to that is really great. And I hope that works out for you. I fully anticipate that it will, because like I said, the comments are usually fairly voluminous.

[00:21:09] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, it’s interesting because some of the comments actually inspire you to create your next piece of content. So it’s always good. Sometimes it is difficult because you can see that it’s negative feedback. But actually I think that negative feedback is a positive thing because you can respond in a positive way. Or you can just take that feedback and then feed it back into the ecosystem and that’s how things get changed. So any negativity is a positivity in my book.

[00:21:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, nice. I think you have to armour yourself with things like that when you go on social media and post content, don’t you? Because it doesn’t matter how perfect it is, and how well aligned it is, there’s always somebody lurking somewhere who is willing to derail your day with a comment like that.

Are you going to be doing this then on official, so you’ve made the content, you’ve created the video, and yada yada. We can get into the process of that in a moment. I’d be kind of interested to know what you do. Are you going to be posting this on official WordPress channels, or is this that you are being hired to create the content and then put it out on your own channels? Or is it, does it come with the official stamp of the wordpress.com YouTube channel or something like that?

[00:22:13] Elliott Richmond: No, it’s on my channel for my audience. So I’m free to do whatever I want really. I can do my own stuff but there is a, kind of an agreement we have to meet certain months and content that will be aligned with whatever’s happening at wordpress.com or at Automattic. But yeah, there’s no restriction. It’s kind of on my channel to my audience.

[00:22:33] Nathan Wrigley: Is it very much then going to be YouTube, like screen shares of the kind of things that you’ve been doing with a code editor or in the backend of WordPress, or a plugin that you’ve installed and have played with or what have you? But obviously on the .com side of things as opposed to the .org side of things.

[00:22:47] Elliott Richmond: I don’t want to give too much away, but I’m given kind of a little bit of early access to stuff that, I found it difficult to find it but it is available, you can get to it, but I needed some pointers. But it’s going to be a mix of technical stuff. You’ve seen my stuff, I’d like to get technical content simplified and I use graphics. And, I mean, if I look at my first stuff, it was nowhere near as polished as it is today. but I like to use animation.

There’s difficult concepts to get over, especially with templating and patterns and template parts and things like that. And if you can simplify that to users, to use this stuff with more knowledge. But there’s also stuff about AI that’s, I mean it even confuses me today, like MCPs and, what’s that? And it’s like large language models and things like that.

So there’s complex stuff that I’m really looking forward to getting my teeth into because I can try and simplify it. And that’s what I like doing in terms of like graphics and analogies. And hopefully it makes sense to people.

[00:23:46] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s going to be, I guess the one word that maybe I would encapsulate it as is educational. The idea is that you come in, learn a thing, or multiple things, and then go away. It’s not just that, oh look, here’s the latest new feature that’s shipping. It’s more, look, here’s the feature, but also here’s how you get to it and how you navigate it and what it does. And if you want to implement it, you must do this, yada, yada, that kind of thing. So educational.

[00:24:12] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, absolutely. There’s lots of other things happening as well that are specifically for developers and not necessarily for wordpress.com. But yeah, engineering those things and putting those together to make something work in the way that you want it to, there is a technical barrier to that. So if I can simplify that and help others to get up and running, then great.

But there’s things like Xdebug that are not enabled by default in the Studio app that I think are really useful. Now I’ve used Xdebug for debugging my code for many years and I honestly cannot do without it. And I didn’t even know it was there, you know, that’s how hidden it was, until I saw a tweet like the other day, and it was, I think it’s recently been rolled out, but I’m like, I am itching to do a video on that, so that I can just let people know how to use it and what it’s beneficial for.

[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you strike me as the kind of character that’s not going to be short of things to do content about. It’s more, which comes first. And I think that’s such a nice gig for you as well, in that you’re obviously a very curious individual. You know, you’ve been making videos for, this is going to come out the wrong way, but, you know, for no reason, if you know what I mean? You know, there was nobody prodding you with a stick saying, Elliott, we need another video now because you’ve been paid for it.

You were doing it because that’s something that you found enjoyable, and you like the experience of doing all of that. And then somebody comes along and says, you know what? I think we could well do with paying you for this. That must have been kind of, almost manna from heaven in a way.

[00:25:34] Elliott Richmond: Absolutely. I mean, I feel so fortunate. I’m so grateful to Michelle Frechette for reaching out to me and making that contact because, yeah, I mean, it’s right up my street. You’ve seen, I’ve got guitars around the studio and I think it’s like, I’m the sort of person that I think it’s good to learn something new every day, regardless of what it is. And yeah, you have to be intrigued by something.

And particularly with code and technology, it’s changing all the time. You can do things in different ways. Very much the same as just fingering around a fretboard and trying to find that lick, or that nice harmonic tone that you never found before. And you think, ah, I can do this. I’m going to show my bass player that I can do this, or my guitar player, or whatever. You know, it’s a bit like that.

And you get excited about the littlest things that maybe are not so exciting to a lot of people, but they are to me, and that’s why I do it. And if I can just impart that on somebody, that’s a bonus to me. And I do get that feedback on YouTube. So I’m always so grateful when I get positive feedback like that. So, yeah, long may it continue. And I’m not going to stop doing it because I find it fascinating and I really enjoy it.

There are many stages to doing a video. You have to figure out what you’re going to talk about, the script, which I didn’t used to do. It was just kind of like, I know this thing, so I’m just going to jump on. But I now script things, break things down into concepts, and then know when I’m going to do some motion graphics. Then I do the headshots, and then I do the editing.

And when I’m done editing, I’m not done editing in like one day, I just do a couple of hours and I go back into the house and I just tell Rachael, I say, I absolutely love editing. It’s just like, it just really excites me. So it is just these little things. Not necessarily about WordPress, but yeah, figuring out how to get a concept across. And then I’ll sit and I’ll bore the tears off Rachael, try and explain this stuff to her, and she’s just patiently listening to me, you know, so I can get it out of my head.

[00:27:19] Nathan Wrigley: No, I think that’s the most credible way of getting to the perfect simulation of what it is you’re trying to educate people with. Because you trip over yourself, don’t you? And you realise, okay, that second point should have been the third. And the third should have been the second. And there was a better way of explaining that. I think it’s great that you do it that way.

And I’m also, pleased is the wrong word, but I’m curious that you script it as well. Because I know that the temptation is often easy, isn’t it? It’s just, okay, I know this stuff inside out, I’ll just go for it. That extra hour, two hours, three hours, whatever it may be, of disciplining yourself to write it down, I think you go a million more miles with that content. You know, you refine it, you work it through, you cut out the additional words that are not needed, that just sort of demonstrates to me that you are really, really serious about it.

[00:28:06] Elliott Richmond: I say scripted, loosely scripted. It’s scripted not to the absolute T. It’s kind of like flashcard prompts.

[00:28:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no. No, no, no. Sorry. Yeah.

[00:28:13] Elliott Richmond: But there’s the structure, let’s say. And sometimes I do word for word. But if I go off piste, if I’m recording, I’m like, yeah, I’m just going brush over that. It’s not that important. It’s just an um or an ah, or an and and a the that shouldn’t be there, but whatever. I mean, if I watch back some of my stuff, I’m like, oh, did I really say that? I’m my worst critic, I guess.

[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: The trick there is never to watch or listen to your own stuff.

[00:28:35] Elliott Richmond: Yeah. Yes.

[00:28:37] Nathan Wrigley: The problem is, if you are self editing, you have to listen to yourself, you know, for every hour that I record, I end up listening to myself for probably about four hours. It is purgatory. For example, the sentence that I’ve just said, I will listen back to and I will be ruing the day that I said it. It’s curious.

Given that it’s on the .com side of things, and if, dear listener, you’re not familiar, we have sort of like this bifurcation, if you like, of WordPress. We have the .org side, which is the way you can go, wordpress.org, and you can download it and put it on a server and put it on your local machine and do what you like with it. And then the .com side, which is where Elliott’s work is going to be mostly living I guess, is the hosted side. So you go and you pay a monthly fee and you have access to WordPress over there, so you don’t have to think about the hosting or anything like that, that’s just taken care of.

Do you get a sense that there’ll be like commercial pressure there? That’s maybe getting to territory that you don’t wish to get into, I don’t know. But will, for example, you have to create content around certain features because it’s shiny and new? So instead of it being educational, it might slip into the more promotional, and I’m doing air quotes as I say that.

[00:29:45] Elliott Richmond: In my experience, little experience working with the guys at the moment, there’s been none of that. It’s literally, you have the free reign, do what you want. There is a benefit of putting a script together in that sense, because you can iron things out if you need to. But in all honesty, of the 10, 15 scripts I’ve already sent through, I’ve only had minimal feedback. They said, great, it looks great. Let’s go with it. And also, if it’s a new shiny thing, show me. I want to know about it. I want to tell others about it as well, you know?

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: Right. So the overlap there is welcome to you, which is quite nice, isn’t it? It’s new, it’s interesting. I would like to mention it anyway.

[00:30:17] Elliott Richmond: There is also another point. I think there’s a misconception between wordpress.com and WordPress, the standalone software. Because effectively it’s the same thing. When you use something like the Studio app, you’ve still got your local files and you can still develop your own stuff. You can get as complex as you want. You are just literally hosting it with the people that make this software. And you then know that you’re going to get the performance, you’re going to get all of the security stuff, you’re going to get all the benefits of hosting with a, on a platform that know the software. So there’s a win-win situation there in my opinion.

[00:30:52] Nathan Wrigley: So you were mentioning earlier, Jamie Marsland, just down the road from you, who’s the head of WordPress YouTube. Obviously kind of a prolific content creator himself, and then got taken on by Automattic to carry on that journey. There’s obviously now you. I wonder if you’ve got any thoughts on how WordPress, and you might read Automattic in here or .com or whatever the right word is. I wonder how you view the seriousness with which they’re taking content creator content.

Because again, if I rewind the clock three or four years ago, it felt that there really wasn’t much coming out that had that kind of official stamp. We were kind of left to our own devices. We were going into Slack and reading comments, or we were going into GitHub queues for plugin developers and things like that.

But it does seem that at some point in the last four or five years, somebody somewhere said, wait, no, video is it. We really have to invest in video. And it feels like you’ve been caught up in that.

There’s no real question there. It’s more just an observation that video content by people who obviously are out in the community doing this with a serious intention. It’s more than just a hobby. It’s something they’ve got a track record of doing seriously. I wonder if you’ve spotted that trend as well.

[00:32:05] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I often look up stuff on YouTube. It used to be Google. How do I, I don’t know, mitre some wood together? You can go to YouTube now and you can find all of this stuff. Or how do you make the perfect naan bread or the perfect pizza, let’s say? So yeah, YouTube is definitely, in the last, I actually don’t think it, it’s always been there, but it’s probably, it’s only become sort of more prominent on my radar, I guess. So if that’s a result of what’s been happening organically, then yeah, I’ve just been sucked into it. But, yeah, I think it’s always been there.

You always get from YouTube content creators about how much more difficult it is, I guess, because there’s more people doing it, so they’ve got less money to give people. But honestly, I’m not in it for the financial reward anyway. I mean, I do get paid ads and stuff, but it’s peanuts every three months, so I’m not in it for that at all.

So yeah, it’s definitely on my radar basically. I mean, in terms of editing and software, I still look up stuff. You know, even whether it’s WordPress or whether it’s command line stuff. Particularly now, if you drop AI into the title, you’re going to get loads of stuff.

[00:33:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, more and more if you go and ask a question of Google, you’re going to get the AI answer first, but then you’re just going to get like a big row of YouTube videos. You know, if you ask it a question beginning, how do I, or something along those lines, the AI often comes first.

I’m actually using a different search engine now. I use one called Kagi, which was actually by coincidence developed by the guy who used to run Manage WP, who then sold it and moved on to make this search engine. There’s another success story coming from the WordPress space. But if you ask it a question, you get the AI generated sort of response over three or four lines, and then after that, just a cavalcade of YouTube videos. And it really, I think, has become the default.

What I’m finding interesting about that is, I think that wordpress.com in this case, but you could read Automattic, are kind of putting their money where their mouth is and doing it in an interesting way.

So rather than, let’s say, employing a team of content creators to do this, this, this, this, and this, they’re asking people like you to just get on with it. Just do what you were doing. I think that’s really interesting. And it’s hard to encapsulate what I’m saying there, but there’s a real level of trust. You know that you’ve got to do things, but nobody’s micromanaging you to tell you what to do. It sounds like nobody’s giving you, okay, we want this piece of exact content, and this one and this one and this one. It’s more, Elliott, you’ve got a track record, you’ve proven yourself, now crack on, but we’ll assist from the financial point of view. I think that’s a really nice model of allowing people like you to do what you do, and the trust that you’ve built up is all that was needed to get you started on that journey.

[00:34:47] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, there are kind of, who this is for, what’s good to do, what isn’t great to do. So there is, not guardrails as such, you’re given complete flexibility, but you are given a kind of like a brief, not template, it’s not template, it’s a, what’s this for? What’s the target?

[00:35:03] Nathan Wrigley: Like an avatar kind of, something like that.

[00:35:05] Elliott Richmond: Yeah. Yeah, an avatar. I don’t find that restrictive in any way. If I did, I wouldn’t be doing it.

[00:35:10] Nathan Wrigley: No, that’s really helpful.

[00:35:11] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, exactly.

[00:35:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But you’re given a lot of rope. It does sound like you’ve got a lot of leeway to do what you like. I mean, maybe there’s constraints around, you know, let’s not make content about the UI of Wix or Squarespace or anything like that. You know, that’s probably out remit.

[00:35:28] Elliott Richmond: That goes without saying.

[00:35:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. But certainly from my point of view, doing this podcast, WP Tavern, I can’t really sum it up, but I have that same freedom. I can have who I like on, nobody’s telling me what I can do and when it should be done. It was just a case of, okay Nathan, you’ve done podcasting, we would like you to do this one. And it sounds like a similar kind of offer was made to you, but on the video side. The trust behind that is hard to communicate, but it feels so nice.

[00:35:57] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ve always said, because I’ve worked on my own for such a long time, since I was in my twenties, and I won’t tell you how old I am, but it’s been a few decades now, I literally am unemployable. I do work on a remote basis for a company, but it’s on a very minimal tech lead responsibility kind of arrangement. But I could not go into an office. I’m just conditioned not to be, someone breathing down my neck. I’ve just been conditioned to have that freedom and creativity that I love. And definitely without a doubt, I’ve been given this opportunity in the same respect. So I’m absolutely stoked about it.

[00:36:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s really lovely. You’ve got that history. And I think we see that in the community a lot. You know, you’ve got a history, and it’s your turn to shine, if you like.

Okay, now the nerdy bit, right at the end. I want to know what your process is. Obviously being a content creator myself, I’ve got a whole load of software that I use and I flit around, but I’ve kind of stabilised on a few key pieces of software, which enabled me to do that journey.

I’m sure that there’s going to be people listening to this who have thought to themselves, I too would like to make videos, and I’m curious, what is your tech stack? I mean, we don’t need to go into absolutely everything, but I’m curious, what are the 3, 4, 5, whatever it may be, essential things that are either on your desk, or on your computer that make the whole thing easy and possible?

[00:37:18] Elliott Richmond: My tech stack is so low key, it’s unbelievable. My lights, if I explain my lights to you, I’ve got basically a cat food pouch box, which is like six inches by four with a hole cut out of it, resting on an LED light with a bit of tissue paper over it. It’s that low key, low tech.

[00:37:34] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s like a small shoebox with a hole cut in with tissue paper diffuse the light.

[00:37:39] Elliott Richmond: Yeah.

[00:37:40] Nathan Wrigley: That’s so great. That’s so cottage industry. I love that. Yeah, because you could of course buy the $150 equivalent, but you know, the cat food box is lying around. That’s brilliant. Oh, I hope this keeps going. I hope you got more of these.

[00:37:55] Elliott Richmond: If I could just turn the camera round. And the other thing is just an iPhone. I just use my iPhone. My iPhone is literally sitting on my computer now. So it’s good enough to do what I need to do with it. At some point it will upgrade, but for anybody who wants to do this out there, you know, you don’t need much kit.

In terms of the software, I just use the Notes app and I just jot down my ideas. I actually use the accessibility keyboard shortcut. So I literally, what I do is tap the key and just speak into my mic about the idea that I want to get across. And then that’s my brain dump. And then I’ll take that, read it back, break it down. It’s all in my own words, I then just get AI to polish it a little bit, so it kind of gives me the bare bones of my script. And then that gets me like 60, 70% there. But it’s literally my brain dump that’s polished, and then I repolish it again. So that’s one key bit of legwork that gets me going quickly.

I’ve picked up a lot of kit over the years from just producing music. I’ve got some NS-10s in front of me, studio monitors, so I can do all my sound balancing and stuff. The other key bit of software is DaVinci Resolve, which is, it’s got all of the motion graphics in it. It is a bit of a head spinner to get into it, but there’s lots of resources out there that can help you get to where you want to be.

There’s lots of stuff out there that you can, like library stuff that you can subscribe to and pull in. But I’m always reluctant to do that because I’m the sort of guy that, I want to, even if it’s code, I want to get into it. I want to understand exactly how it works and do it myself. So working with nodes and animation in that sense has been, it’s been a big learning curve, but I’ve absolutely loved it.

And then just the editing is like DaVinci Resolve. And it has everything in it. I pay a licence for it because I want all the whistles and bells, but you can use the free version and I just cannot believe what you can get away with, with the free version. You get all of the motion graphics, you get all of the audio, you get the colour correction, plus all of the editing suite. It’s incredible.

I’m just looking around to see what other stuff I’ve got, but yeah, that is literally about it.

[00:39:52] Nathan Wrigley: I think you’ve encapsulated perfectly. I mean, really you need a computer with a bit of editing software, and there’s many. Some free, some much more expensive. You can certainly pay a fortune for some editing software. But also camera, a little bit of lighting, I guess a backdrop and a quiet room would help. But that’s kind of really all that it takes. The key bit, of course, the bit that you are not mentioning of course is that script bit. That’s where the magic happens.

And people like you are able to turn difficult things into easy to consume things. For people like me who consume it, it all just looks so straightforward and easy. But I’m well aware that in the background there’s probably quite a lot of soul searching and rehashing and rethinking and you were saying, explaining to your wife and re-explaining to your wife and so on.

And so whilst the software and the iPhone camera and all of that are necessary to make it happen, I think the bit which makes your stuff, and people of your calibre’s stuff, stand out is that bit inside your head. The bit which only you can do in the way that you do it, you know? I’m grateful for all the stuff that you’ve done for many years, and long may it continue. You’re carrying on throughout 2026, I think is how it’s framed at the moment.

[00:41:02] Elliott Richmond: Yep, or up to December at least that’s the arrangement. But I’m also allowed to do whatever, you know, my own stuff as well. So if you spot a video about me making pizza or preparing dough, somehow I can thread WordPress into that, I will. I probably can actually because I’ve got a dough calculator.

[00:41:20] Nathan Wrigley: With your pizza plugin, I’m sure that there’ll be ways of getting those messages across. I think we’ll knock it on the head there, as we say in the UK. Best of luck. I’m sure luck is not the thing that you need, but I hope it goes well, and I hope that you enjoy it and that obviously the crowd of people who come along gain a lot of knowledge from everything that you’ve done.

Just before we go, I think we should probably say where we find you online, where that YouTube channel is, or your website, whichever you prefer. Both if you like.

[00:41:46] Elliott Richmond: Yeah, you’ll find me on YouTube, which is elliottrichmondwp. I do have an Elliott Richmond, which is all of my personal stuff, so don’t get that confused with the WordPress stuff. It’s elliottrichmondwp. And you can find my blogs and my brain dumps on elliottrichmond.co.uk. And that is double L, double T by the way.

[00:42:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, as I was typing your name in, subconsciously it always ended up with one T. I don’t know what was going on there. But all the Elliots in my life have got a single T. E-L-L-I-O-T-T, and then Richmond, as you might imagine.

If you go to wptavern.com and you look for the Elliott Richmond episode using the search functionality, then you’ll get that episode, I’m sure. And all of the links for anything that we have mentioned, so the YouTube channel and the website, what have you, that will all be in there, one click. Along with a transcript of everything that we’ve talked about as well. So Elliott Richmond, thank you. Good luck with 2026 and thanks for coming on the podcast.

[00:42:46] Elliott Richmond: You’re welcome and thank you so much for having me.

[00:42:48] Nathan Wrigley: You’re very welcome.

On the podcast today we have Elliott Richmond.

Elliott’s been deep in the WordPress community for over twenty years, developing since the early days, back when WordPress was yet to be forked from b2. He’s freelanced, built with multiple CMS systems, and has contributed creatively to the community, including releasing a WordPress advent calendar way back in 2013. He’s an active WordPress developer, content creator on YouTube, and, unexpectedly, a part-time pizza vendor, running a thriving pizza business powered entirely by WordPress tools.

Many listeners will know Elliott for his technical videos, but today we discuss how WordPress has served as the glue for unexpected ventures, like scaling a local pizza business during lockdown using WooCommerce, Jetpack, and custom plugins. Elliott’s experience showcases just how flexible WordPress can be, whether for websites, unique ordering systems, or even streamlining business processes for other niches.

Recently, Elliott has been asked by Automattic to create educational content around WordPress.com, giving him early access to features and allowing him to share his workflow and insights with a broader audience. He talks about his approach to content creation, balancing scripting versus improvisation, and details his low-tech kit, from iPhone cameras to DIY lighting.

Throughout the episode, Elliott shares how community connections and feedback loops, especially via YouTube comments, shape his work, and he discusses the new opportunities for content creators within the WordPress ecosystem.

If you’re interested in WordPress beyond websites, curious about how to turn technical know-how into educational video content, or just want to hear about WordPress-powered pizza (and who doesn’t), this episode is for you.

Useful links

Elliott featured in WP Tavern before: 24 WordPress Snippets ’til Christmas, Submissions Open for 2019

 Jamie Marsland on YouTube

 Gutenberg Times

 Xdebug

Kagi Search Engine

 DaVinci Resolve

Elliott’s YouTube channel

Elliott’s website

In this episode, host Adam Weeks discusses cybersecurity strategies with Andrew Killen, Aaron Campbell, and Mart Virkus, exploring the collaboration essential for addressing evolving cyber threats.

In this episode, Derek Hanson chats with Devin Walker about Jetpack Social updates, including interface redesign, Twitter integration, AI features, and upcoming WordPress 7.0 enhancements for WordPress users.

The Hackathon team discusses their AI tool, TestAlly, focusing on improving accessibility for developers while enhancing collaboration and business benefits.

The discussion emphasizes the complexity of creating a universal decentralized social network, highlighting the importance of innovation, competition, and building bridges between differing protocols.

Since he spoke to Dean Baquet in 2017, JAŸ-Z hasn’t done an interview. Hov’s back! He sat down with GQ, and it’s a lovely listen and read.

We played enough defense, 2026 is all about offense.

Your morality defines who you are, not what you’ve attained.

In this episode, Birgit Pauli-Haack welcomes Beth Soderberg to discuss key updates in WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8. They kick off with small talk about shifting seasons in Munich and Virginia before diving into the new content guidelines in Gutenberg 22.7, focused on standardizing editorial voice across AI and human content contributors. Both speakers express healthy skepticism about AI-generated content, stressing that while AI assists with research and “grunt work” like alt text or excerpts, the core value in writing remains human expertise and review. They caution about automation pitfalls and emphasize validating all AI outputs.

The discussion shifts to the new WordPress AI connectors, which let users connect to services like OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and others—including local providers such as Olama and European alternatives like Mistral. Birgit Pauli-Haack explains the evolving infrastructure allowing developers to add and switch connectors with ease, and encourages the community to experiment and test.

A central topic is the release of WordPress 7.0, with a highlight on the increased minimum PHP requirement to 7.4, likely to disrupt agencies with older sites. The admin’s new look-and-feel is poised to confuse some clients, demanding extra support from agencies. Beth Soderberg also celebrates practical improvements: cover block video embeds using external sources, block visibility by screen size, pattern overrides, breadcrumbs block, and streamlined font management. Both speakers note the importance of hidden, friction-reducing features and the advancement of developer-facing infrastructure. The episode closes with a preview of ongoing enhancements in Gutenberg 22.8 and beyond.

Show Notes / Transcript

Editor: Sandy Reed

Logo: Mark Uraine

Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack

Show Notes

Special Guest: Beth Soderberg

Bethink Studio

WordPress.org Profile + Slack

Talks by Beth Soderberg

Gutenberg Changelog #122 – Gutenberg 21.8 and WordPress 6.9

My Process for Building a Custom WordPress Theme in 2025

Bill Erickson,Ellen Bauer, Beth Soderberg: Case Studies – How to Prepare your Theme for Gutenberg

And more

AI in WordPress

Guidelines Lands in Gutenberg 22.7

Call for Testing: Community AI Connector Plugins

AI Provider for OpenRouter

AI Provider for Ollama

AI Provider for Mistral

AI Experiements plugin

WordPress Core and Gutenberg

WordPress 6.9.2 retrospective

WordPress 7.0 RC2

What’s new in Gutenberg 22.8? (25 March)

Dev Notes

Pattern Overrides in WP 7.0

Pattern Editing in WordPress 7.0

Block Visibility in WordPress 7.0

Dimensions Support Enhancements in WordPress 7.0

Custom CSS for Individual Block Instances

New Block Support: Text Indent (textIndent)

Introducing the Connectors API in WordPress 7.0

Introducing the AI Client in WordPress 7.0

Client-Side Abilities API in WordPress 7.0

Stay in Touch

Did you like this episode? Please write us a review

Ping us on X (formerly known as Twitter) or send DMs with questions. @gutenbergtimes and @bph.

If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.

Please write us a review on iTunes! (Click here to learn how)

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 129th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode we will talk about WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator of the Gutenberg Times and full-time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. With me today, and I’m really happy about that, is again Beth Soderberg, founder and CEO of Bethink Studio, a full-service boutique agency and of web experts to tackle any project. Beth has been a longtime WordPress theme builder and WordCamp speaker. She’s also been an early adopter of the blog editor and block themes. Beth, how are you today? Welcome to the show.

Beth Soderberg: I am well. How are you today? Thank you for having me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m good, I’m good. We have winter in Munich again. It was spring and now it’s back to winter. So I’m happy to get out of the town for WordCamp Asia next week. So yes, I’m really happy about that.

Beth Soderberg: We’ve been switching from winter to spring every day here. Every day in Virginia. Yep. It’s different every day.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what’s the weather doing? Well, I don’t know.

Beth Soderberg: No, I’ve had to look every morning because it’s in the last week I’ve been outside in a winter coat and a tank top and rain boots and you just don’t know. You wake up and it’s a surprise.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it’s the beauty of surprises. But who likes surprises? I want my spring be steady.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I agree.

Announcements

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so under the announcements we have one thing that’s that content guidelines landed in Gutenberg 22.7. We didn’t really talk about it with Maggie Cabrera at the last episode, but the WordPress AI team has launched guidelines. They are live experiments in the Gutenberg 22.7 or Gutenberg plugin and this project creates a single source of truth for site standards and ensures that everyone, humans and AI tools, follow the same editorial voice and content rules. By providing this infrastructure layer, WordPress can finally maintain a consistency across content contributors. So that’s so far from the experiment post that I’m definitely going to share in the show notes. When you want to use AI for helping you produce content, you definitely want to store some of the standards somewhere. And the experiment lets you do this on your website in your interface with a nice interface for that. I don’t know how I feel about this because I have been using AI quite a bit in the last two years and some of it was for content creation ideas. But the writing is still kind of mostly a human factor. But it helps me for research and it helps me for learning. So I’m not quite sure how that translates to a WordPress site, but I guess if you have ongoing content reproduction that is more service oriented, then you might want to use the help of LLMs or something like that. What do you think?

Beth Soderberg: I’m skeptical for the same reasons. I think that I have had clients ask for something like this. But the more those clients have actually used AI to create content, the more those very same people who had announced that they were going to create all of their content through AI decide that they are going to use AI for research and then create their content. So the AI in actual practical use has been more about reducing friction in that discovery research phase of writing and less about creating the writing itself until you get to the editing part when it becomes helpful again for grammar. But that actual connecting ideas and proving expertise piece is where AI can’t do it. And you need something, somebody who actually understands what they’re reading to piece together the logic of it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I can also see, and we will see this in that you use AI to write an excerpt or to give you suggestions for titles or make sure that there’s an alt text on the image. I think these grunt work tasks kind of thing of AI is really helpful, but I think the human ideas are still. Well, humans hallucinate so much better than AI can ever can. Right.

Beth Soderberg: How can we possibly replicate that? And I think there’s also a place for it with things like you mentioned the alt text. Right. Having it generate them all and then validating that it did it correctly is much faster than writing it all yourself. That is where we’re going to see these things actually become practical. Right. There’s a lot of big ideas about it, which makes sense when you’re dealing with a new technology and an innovation in a major workflow. But in actuality, I think that’s more how people are going to use it. And I think if people set it up to automate everything and then never look at it, never validate it, that’s people are just going to get in trouble over that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And I, you know, I use it a lot to generate fake content so that I can show someone what something will look like knowing that the content I’m showing them is not real. Right. But when you’re dealing with real content, the biggest mistake I’ve seen over and over again, and humans will learn because we always eventually do. But the mistake is not reviewing what AI has done.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It’s not a replacement. It’s a tool that you need to validate like any other tool you have to do. I can see that if you have a longer text like for 4,000 words or something like that, you could actually use AI to identify the gaps. If a reader goes through it and say, okay, there is a gap because it didn’t explain why something happens. I think those tips are really helpful, especially when you have longer text or you want to focus on one problem and just kind of figure out what’s in scope and out scope. But I think that’s more like an advisory kind of thing and not a doer.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, validating. Because sometimes I love Grammarly Pro. Grammarly the free version is very annoying, but if you pay it becomes a really useful tool. But even then, the content suggestions it makes, sometimes they tighten up your language and they make it. They add the commas, which is the thing that I don’t do naturally on my own apparently. But sometimes they change the meaning completely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And that’s when you’re like, nope, thanks for the suggestion. That’s a no.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I think how this type of thing used well, will make people more efficient. But I also can see it creating a mountain of work for somebody who doesn’t actually need to go through all of these ridiculous suggestions about it. And I think that deciding when to use it, when it makes sense, those strategic decisions about how to use it are going to be what makes it either something that really helps somebody in their publishing workflow or really hinders somebody else.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, if you’re a single blog blogger having a little editor go through that and give you some tips that might not be a bad idea, but sometimes. But right. If you have been blogging for many, many years, you don’t need things like that. It changes your voice and it changes the outlook. That’s what the guidelines are actually for that you can create some of the guidelines as it meant to be to help AI to streamline some of that stuff and also to know about what you want to do. And that certainly helps.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah.

Community Contributions

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Speaking of AI, what I found in so in 7.0 WordPress. So getting closer to that release, there is now a new connectors page that you could connect to an OpenAI to Google Gemini or to Anthropic Cloud from your site. And if you have certain tools that help you with those connections. So there are AI providers for other AI systems like I just discovered three of them. One is the AI provider for Open router or router depending on which English speaking country you go to. It’s a little bit different. So open, I say Router is a service that lets developers use many different AI models like those from Google OpenAI but also others through one simple connection. And the provider was developed by Jonathan Bossenger who is on the AI team and talks about AI on the developer blog. There’s also an AI provider for Ollama, and Ollama is a local system where you can connect local LLMs so you can download an LLM set and Ollama helps you connect that with the task that you want to do. The benefit of Ollama is that it’s on your server and it doesn’t go out to the third-party services, but you still need a provider and connector to it. You can do this on any VPS connection or virtual private server system because you have room and space there to download and add certain things. But it’s definitely important for companies that want to not get data outside of their system.

And the last one is for Europeans. The AI provider for Mistral. Mistral AI is a French AI company founded in 2023 by a former Google DeepMind and Meta researchers and they built and publish large language model and be a respected independent AI in Europe. Speaking of this, what that all comes together is that the AI team and with that Lauri Saarni published a call for testing for community AI connector plugins. There are certain links to the plugins and the connectors, so it would be really cool if you’re interested in that part of it, to actually go ahead and test things and report back what you find and what you didn’t find and how it all works for your site. It’s a totally different approach for working with the site using AI as we discussed. But it might be pretty interesting for developers to connect with all those AI providers and provide services in a plugin or something like that.

And if you are not a developer, you can install the AI Experiments plugin that also comes from the core AI team and it will show up on the Connectors page with a link to the plugin and what you can do with it. And it has these things like create an excerpt or check the alt text or create a featured image just so you can kind of get a feel for these kinds of works on the WebPress site. Do you have, do you think you have a need for. To kind of use some of the providers for your agency or for some clients?

Beth Soderberg: I think for some clients it has started. I think that for the agency itself, not yet. We have started to do more writing publicly, but really what we’re doing is turning internal communications to clients into public facing documentation so that we can point to them more easily. So it’s not something we need help with. In the same way, I think for some clients we have started to integrate things like this in an experimental way. Right. And there are, as with anything that’s new, people don’t know how to use these things yet. And I am not against experimenting with a new thing. I love the new stuff, but at the same time I’m cautious about putting new things into a production environment without really making sure that it makes sense. Some of these, in terms of experimentation, like I will install them and actually Grammarly is a great example. It took me several years to decide that I was fine with it because I tried it and it was annoying. And then a few years later I tried it again and it was still annoying. And then one day I realized that it really was like their premium suggestions really were fixing my comma issue, which is a known issue I have with writing and grammar. I just don’t put commas anywhere.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I put them in randomly and so there’s a few commas.

Beth Soderberg: But you know, I experimented with the tool probably three times before I was like, you know what, let me try the premium version and see how that goes. And I tried it and a few days later I was like, yeah, this is actually making my writing better. But it was one of those, like I was monitoring over time if it really made sense with my workflow.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And that’s how I approach it too.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s how I felt about these. And I think what’s exciting about it is that the infrastructure to do it is becoming more full fledged. But that does not mean people know how to do it yet.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Beth Soderberg: And so that’s the next step is that experimentation phase collectively of how, what. How can we make these tools that we’ve now created function in the best way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I really appreciate that the WordPress core developers think about the plumbing of all these services and putting it all the foundation in to open up that total space for freedom for the developers. And there’s a standard there on how to approach certain. So if you are as a site owner, don’t have a plugin that kind of taps into LMMs and you open up Gemini for it, you couldn’t switch just easily to Claude when you think that’s a better fit for that problem, but the plugin will still work. So that’s actually what this whole connector thing is about. And it just came up as for the AI providers, but actually the connector API is for any external service standard. So a standard for any external service. So if you need the OpenStreetMap on your site and you have an API key, the plugin can actually use the connectors API to monitor those API keys and just put it in there. The plugin doesn’t have to come up with its own interface for that, which a lot of plugin developers did for the last 15 years. Yeah. But now they can could actually throw away that piece of the plugin and just tab into the connectors API and don’t have to maintain that piece of the code.

What’s Released – WordPress 7.0 RC2

But anyway, so that’s kind of the bigger picture behind it. And that’s all coming with WordPress 7.0, which we are now getting to the more practical stuff of WordPress 7.0. So first of all, the WordPress 7.0 release candidate 2 has been published this week. It’s crunch time. The final release is only two weeks away. So if you haven’t tested it, now is really the time to get in there and figure out if your theme plugins and sites actually still work with 7.0, and the developer notes are published. The field guide is in the works and I will continue the list of dev notes in the show Notes like we did the last two episodes. I also know because I have been working on it. The Gutenberg Times Source of Truth is almost done and will be published before this episode actually hits your favorite podcast app. So you get an additional link there. So, Beth, did you get a chance to look over the WordPress 7.0 features? What are the most important ones for you and your fellow agency owners and developers? Is there anything that you are really excited about?

Beth Soderberg: Yes and yes. So the first thing that I think is going to be honestly hugely problematic for a lot of agencies is the change in PHP minimums, because I think that there are. I know that there are a lot of folks sitting on older sites, older themes, maybe they’re stuck at PHP 7.1 and there are old things out there. And I think that this PHP requirement jump is going to catch some people off guard. So it jumps from it’s we’re now requiring 7.4.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And if you do, it’s already 6.9.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right?

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. But I think this is going to hit harder. Okay. Because people are going to want the new stuff. Like there’s a lot in here that is really great and I’m starting with the thing that I think is going to be most disruptive because I think that people are going to want the other stuff, right? And so I think that that’s going to catch some people off guard. The other thing that I think is going to be really important is the new admin look and feel because people have been training their clients for many, many, many, many, many years with what it looks like now. And there is a client education need here because when the admin changes, even in minor ways, you get clients that come back and say, what happened? I don’t know how to do it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay, Even if nothing changes except the color, right?

Beth Soderberg: Where did it go? Why is this different? And did I do something? Did I write the, that human element of like, hey, you’re okay, it’s gonna look a little different, but I promise you’re gonna be able to do it. Just holler if you have any questions. Right? Because I think that there’s a lot of at least working with long term clients where you become sort of an advisor on the technology rather than a day to day implementer. And for those folks with something like this, I, what I like to do is say, hey, heads up, we are doing, we never do the major core updates right away. I am a let me see how it goes for everyone else.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Beth Soderberg: Type and then if it seems okay, then I’ll go for it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So you’re one of the ones who wait for 7.0.1.

Beth Soderberg: Absolutely. Unless it’s been like three weeks and there isn’t one. Yeah, right. So I either wait for a period of time or I wait for a point release. And if there’s a point release, I wait at least 24 hours to make sure there’s not another point release. But point being though, that this is a big enough shift in terms of what people will see and what people can do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which part of the admin is actually the one that will disrupt people’s minds.

Beth Soderberg: Just I think it looking different at all.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. So we should never change that. Is that what you’re kind of thinking?

Beth Soderberg: No, we should absolutely change it. But because we have not changed it for many, many, many years, it will be a surprise. And I think that it’s easy as folks who are in these systems every day to be like, wow, they finally fixed that. That’s great. That might be my reaction to many of these changes. Right. But I also know when I log in to pay my credit card. And they’ve changed it all. And even though the buttons are the same, it looks different. I don’t have as much confidence about clicking the button. And there’s this. The vast majority of people who are maintaining the contents on these sites day to day are marketing people, communications people, regular everyday writing people. And they are not sitting there thinking about how the structure of the software works all the time the way we do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But they still get their work done.

Beth Soderberg: They still get their work done. What I like to do with clients is just reduce friction by increasing confidence.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Right. And so, like, my message to them is going to be, hey, you need to know that this is going to look different, but your workflow in terms of the things you know how to do is the same. Don’t let it freak you out. You’ve got this. Keep going. Right. But like, just that little bit, because that’s. That is 100% what gets people. It’s the smallest stuff. They just need to know, like, hey, the problem’s not me. Oh, wait, there’s not a problem. It’s fine. And then they’re good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. It’s the first five seconds. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: It’s that psychological adjustment. And I think because it hasn’t changed for so long that it’s just going to be something that I mentioned.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Is there anything else that you are really excited about or is it just.

Beth Soderberg: I know. Okay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Things change. Okay. I don’t like it to change.

Beth Soderberg: Things change. I’m really, really excited about the cover block video embeds.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: That is really, really going to reduce the size of things as they load for a lot of websites. And that is fabulous. In addition to improving workflow, all of the things around block visibility by screen size make me really happy. I’m really happy about the changes in the header block. And I’ve been building this into themes for years. And the only thing that makes me nervous about it is that I need to go back and see how it impacts the things I’ve already built that replicate this feature.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But you mean the navigation overlays?

Beth Soderberg: The navigation overlays. Yeah. Because you’re going to have such increases in both accessibility compliance and SEO optimization just by virtue of having the option to manage your headings visually versus syntactically. So I’m very excited about that. I love that our revisions menu now has visual changes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Because I know that most people looking at the markup that’s been in there lately are like, I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I have to squint so much to look through the code to find things. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And then there’s a few exciting changes to the navigation and the better workflows for pattern overrides. Yeah, it was there before, but it was one of those mystery off menu features if it was there, if you knew how to find it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. Right.

Beth Soderberg: So those are the things I’m most excited about. I think there’s some other cool stuff in there and I am excited about the general infrastructure that we were just referencing that is being solidified with this release. And I think that piece may not be as exciting on the outset because it’s infrastructure. It’s like nonprofits have a hard time funding infrastructure process projects. It’s the same reason. But it lays the groundwork for a whole new level of experimentation. I’m excited to see where that goes and I recognize I think you said it very well a few minutes ago the thoughtfulness to create an extensible infrastructure that has gone into these features in the roadmap and sort of planning moving forward.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You mentioned the cover block video embeds. That means that you can have a video just to catch up with our listeners. It’s to use a URL to YouTube or to Vimeo and pull that in into a cover block instead of uploading the video to the website because that reduces the cost of hosting and bandwidth for the website. Definitely. And it also you don’t have to maintain the speed and all that on your own server. So it’s always good to offset that into a different service. How are you feeling about the manage the fonts from the appearance menu directly instead of hunting it down under the fonts typography menu on the slobber styles,

Beth Soderberg: I’m feeling really good about that. It remains to be seen for me the biggest issue I have with font management. I am not sure it might be addressed here, but I need to experiment. When you get a font from a total third party non-standard like independent type foundry place getting those integrated, there has still been some friction. So I’m excited about it being easier to find in general. I think that’s great. .

I will be experimenting a little bit with if it reduces friction in some of these more edge cases. Because if you’re using a Google font it’s great and it’s been pretty good for a while. But if you are integrating something from another provider, if it’s a big provider the friction is not as bad. But if it’s like this obscure type foundry that makes like only these little types of historic fonts, which I run into recently, getting it actually integrated properly, it’s really hard because you’re dealing with not the most sophisticated type foundry in terms of the format of their files and they’re not necessarily plugging in as best as the totally optimized stuff from the more common sources. So, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Is it more a format issue or is it more kind of how it scales in different font sizes and different typography features?

Beth Soderberg: It’s a format issue with the font files themselves. And so I think some of it is probably an education piece for people who make fonts, but I also know that most developers don’t know that much about how fonts are made. And so when you put those two things together, you create some problems. But I think this is a huge step towards getting to the point of being able to solve the edge cases. Right. Because right now finding where you manage the fonts is difficult.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right? Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: We’re going in a great direction, getting into the nitty gritty of which font providers are supported and that I think that’s the next step from here, personally, because I do think there’s a homogeny that started from a type standpoint around everyone’s using Google fonts because they. It’s easy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But it’s also problematic for European sites.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, right, yeah. Because the different requirements over whether you’re hosting the font files or Google is hosting the font files, like, then you’re getting all into all of these legal technicalities of where the font is and who owns it. And I’m glad I’m not a lawyer.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. So, all right, so there are a few developer goodies coming, so to speak, down the pipeline. The PHP-only block registrations and then the pattern overrides for custom blocks that you already mentioned. Those. I think there are a few smaller stuff like the HTML block enhancements where you can put the CSS separately from the JavaScript and the HTML. You could actually kind of create your own little app there, depending on what privileges you have. I found that there are some problems when you don’t have admin privileges. The HTML block really gets scrambled, but that’s an overall kind of problem with the capabilities, I think. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Oh, I forgot the breadcrumbs block. That. That’ll help a lot of things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah, yeah. I’m also sure that a lot of agencies and site owners already had that problem solved through like for instance, the Yoast SEO plugin had already programs for many, many years. Yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: But I like my websites to be as lean and efficient as possible. And this feels like when, for a long time I was using Coblox for accordions. Right. And in the beginning, coblox had a lot of things that Core didn’t. And so you were using a bunch of things. And eventually it became that I was only using the accordion everywhere. And then one day it became possible to do the equivalent in Core and I was like, great, I can get rid of this plugin that’s only doing this one thing, but has all this other stuff. And I think that’s what makes me excited about this. Yeah. You can do it through Yoast. There’s a number of ways to do it. There’s some independent breadcrumbs block plugins that are really good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I know that Justin Tadlock had a very good breadcrumbs plugin and he was advising on the core implementation there.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, right. Yeah. And I’ve used Justin Tadlock’s breadcrumbs plugin for a long time, and I’m not going to rip it out of something just because it’s there. It works. It’s good. But for something else where, like, you only have this one thing that you’re really using in this big suite of plugins. Yoast is one of them. Jetpack is one of them. Any sort of like cadence blocks, code blocks, any collection of a large number of things when you’re only using one of them, you should be considering the idea that maybe you shouldn’t use it at all. And that’s what makes me excited about the ability to do this through Core, because it allows for some of that extra bloat to be stripped away in some circumstances.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. All right. Anything else that you want to kind of cover on 7.0 for your agency of developing theme building needs?

Beth Soderberg: I think that the PHP-only block registration, we sort of glanced over it, but I think that’s a very exciting big deal. It opens up, you know, the whole challenge. I think from a developer standpoint, the whole time with Gutenberg has been, how do I level up to do this new thing? How do I level up to do this new thing? And this opens that door wider. And anything that we are doing to open that door wider is great. Similarly, there’s a few things in here that are just really tiny that I think will help people. They’re not like, again, reducing friction. So little enhancements to the query loop, adding some new navigation stuff that is just really tiny, but really Helpful dimension support for width and height. That sounds crazy, right? Like it’s little tiny stuff that reduces friction and stuff. So there’s more of that in here. Like the concept of the grid block being responsive is really great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it was responsive before, but there was a setting where it wasn’t and that’s kind of changed now, right? Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: So, yeah, I just. There’s a lot of hidden goodies in here that reduce friction. I do think the biggest things to look out for are if your themes are compatible, if your plugins are compatible, and if you have built in things that replicate some of this functionality. How does that work? Because we’re starting to enter, at least for how I’ve been building themes, a zone where things I have done historically to account for some of these needs are being subsumed by core, which is great. I just don’t know how it’s going to work. So, you know, I think that’s going to be different for everyone in terms of which things it is. But hopefully, and I say hopefully because I know that we have a unified development philosophy about how we build our themes and there’s sort of a continuous logical thread for our themes as they’re built over time. Hopefully agencies who have an internal logic to how they have been building themes can look at this list and say we should look at how we do that and make sure it still works. Yeah, right. Because there’s also going to be agencies where they have a mishmash of things and they don’t know and it’s going to be a one off for each site to see what happens. And you know, that goes for anybody who’s inherited themes too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but that’s also for any of the WordPress releases. Yeah, you have to go through a certain testing phase there.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I think that’s true. And I think some of this is honestly that it’s been a while since we’ve had a major release and so the quantity of little things feels more.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely.

Beth Soderberg: And I think that’s part of why my reaction is this way, because I haven’t had this thought process.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: At least five months.

Beth Soderberg: At least.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, six months. Nine came out December 2nd.

Beth Soderberg: Right. And so as somebody who was used to the four times a year cadence, it is longer and what’s packed into it is greater. And so I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, but it is an adjustment in terms of absolutely how you review things and what you’re looking for. And it’s more of a. This one feels more like a surprise. Not that it is a surprise, but it feels more like a surprise because it is not on this schedule that I had come to expect. Right. And I think we’re getting towards a new schedule, which is really great. But until we are all psychologically adjusted to whatever that new schedule is, it’s going to be a slightly bigger task to review because there’s more. And psychologically it’s going to be like, oh, right, I guess that’s happening and you’re, you know, you got to go do it. Yeah. So I just think it’s just. There’s a little more and the timing is not as predictable.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I think that the break that was in Twenty Twenty-Five kind of skewed that anyway. Yeah. So we had an April 25, we had a release, and then the last. The next one wasn’t until December. Yeah. So there were eight months that kind of 15 Gutenberg plugin releases. It didn’t feel that much that it is now in 7.0, because that was just kind of coming up out of that pause. And now there’s a real excitement about the Real Time collaboration. There’s excitement about AI. Yeah. So, yeah, it feels that there are quite a few heavy new features in there that also kind of drown out some of the really quality of life things that we have been waiting for quite a bit here.

Beth Soderberg: Right. Yeah. And I. I think it’s like coming back from a long vacation, like, oh, ooh, this is really exciting, you know, but that’s how. That’s how it feels and it’s good. But it is, absolutely. I think that Twenty Twenty-Five, you didn’t have to be as vigilant because it wasn’t happening.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep, it was a good break.

Beth Soderberg: I think everyone needed it. Honestly, I think everyone really needed it. I know I needed it. But it is, you know, getting back into the. The groove of things is. Is where we are now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: For which I am thankful, but it’s still an adjustment.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Me too. Yeah. And now with 7.0 kind of out the door almost. Yeah.

Gutenberg 22.8

We are looking at Gutenberg 22.8 that has been released. Was released this week also kind of what comes into 7.1. It’s already starting and people are discussing things. So although there were quite a few PRs that were either all part of the new WordPress UI package that hasn’t been merged into Core yet, or it’s bug fixes for the connectors or the Real time collaboration for 7.0, so some of the PRs are actually backported to the release candidates and the beta to the release candidates.

But let’s talk about some of the things that will not be in 7.0, but definitely in 7.1 and what’s new in the Gutenberg plugin. So the first thing is the navigation support for the current menu item. So in theme JSON, meaning when you have a navigation and you’re on a current page that’s part of the navigation, how do you signal that you are at the current page right now in the navigation? And that has been missing for quite a while or people have just did some CSS workaround of that, but now you can actually style that in theme JSON. And so this is cool. What’s also cool is that there is an interface for the states like Hover Focus current. I’m not sure if that’s going to be in there, but it’s also part of making the navigation and the hover states and the pseudo support that comes into 7.0, but now it comes also to the interface. So that’s pretty cool.

Beth Soderberg: That’s my favorite part.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which one?

Beth Soderberg: The navigation stuff again. The interface around the navigation has gotten a lot better in various iterations of Gutenberg, but there’s still some stuff that you’d think you would be able to do that you can’t. And that’s what some of this is filling in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: There have been some great work. Some of it gets into 7.0 and some of it is still ongoing. So I really like the navigation that’s actually in 7.0, that you can create pages and publish them and have them in the navigation in one workflow kind of thing. You don’t have to get out of it. You may have to think about it. You just kind of create the page and then you fill it in with content later.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. And I’ve seen that in other systems. I don’t remember what that is. One of those things where some of these changes, you’re like, you know, I saw that once somewhere. Was it Joomla? Was it Drupal? Was it whatever? I don’t know. But I liked it. And now it’s here. And that’s good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely.

Beth Soderberg: And that’s how I feel about that because I do appreciate the tiny little decisions that are being considered here by the core team because it seems very small. But the amount of friction you’re reducing and the amount of time you’re saving for people is huge.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s huge. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s millions of millions of site owners that kind of have advantage. Yeah. Do you want to take the next

Beth Soderberg: thing, the tabs menu. So I think this is going to be fun too. So basically we’ve got a refactor of the tabs menu block. So it’s basically making this more efficient and making some templating changes to how the tabs block works. And if you look at the actual PR for it, there’s really good, very detailed descriptions of how. So it’s making it very clear of it’s no longer using the template block duplicated in PHP and instead it’s rendering with per tab context.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Beth Soderberg: And that’s like all gobbledygook to some listeners. Maybe, but like really what it’s doing is making it more efficient and making it more extensible from a code perspective.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And also for theme developers.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, right. And making it more possible again, opening that door a little wider for more people to be able to work within the code infrastructure. Because that has been the thing that’s been the biggest challenge in terms of developer adoption of Gutenberg.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the refactor was also necessary to bring it in line with the approach for the accordion block so that certain methods and certain functions can be replicated in a similar way for the TAPS block. I was actually sad to hear that very early that it won’t make it into 7.0, but I think that was one of the reasons where they said, okay, let’s, let’s see if we can kind of align it a little bit more with the accordion block. And it’s no surprise that Sarah Norris, who has been a guest here at the Changelog quite a bit, she also created the accordion block and she has been now instrumental on the restructure of the tabs menu and inner blocks to get it in line and we have make it more streamlined for developers and theme builders.

Beth Soderberg: The one thing to add that is an exciting piece for especially theme developers is the addition of anchor support for the tabs. So that’ll help a lot in terms of things like navigation structures and feasibility. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And also to kind of interlink different pages. You can link to some of the tabs if it’s interesting enough. Yeah. So I know that WooCommerce is using that for their products template. So they have built their own one back then and now they get a little bit closer to core, which makes it more extensible and also appreciative they don’t have to maintain the code for it.

Beth Soderberg: Yep, absolutely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which is quite a bit. So right now I’m fishing around on my computer to find my notes again. So here we are. All right,

Beth Soderberg: the next one, the showing one’s own presence and collaborative editing sessions is I think existentially important and just is really going to help this UI experience from the baseline that’s being released in 7.0.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, I’m pretty sure that it will actually come to 7.0. That made it into the release. That’s good. So the next piece is the one that you can have the site logo and icon screen in the design panel. So in the site editor there’s another menu item now to update the site logo and the icon screen directly from the site editor. So you don’t have to go out into the settings page and upload everything that you need or into the site logo block or header. You can do it right there from, from the menu. So it’s really an interesting update to change the site logo and the site icon directly in the design site editor.

Beth Soderberg: It’s reducing friction. I think that there’s a workflow confusion. There’s the customizer that has become this vestigial organ that sometimes you need, sometimes you don’t need. Where’s this? Wait a minute, where do I add css? Is it over here? Is it over here? Is it over here? Could it be here? And I think that we’re pruning what we need to do through alternate interfaces through changes like this. And the more we can streamline, the better because the biggest confusion I’ve seen is actually with brand new or like more junior developers who do not know the quote old way. And so the idea that it’s even there, like they’ll get stuck because they can’t figure out where it could possibly be coming from. And then some old timer is like, oh, it’s over here in this menu that you can’t see anymore.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Or yeah. So the site icon at the site logo has been a hidden place and only until now it’s kind of coming into the forefront. Yes. So the next thing is another one for the collaboration. I just wanted to point out that by default the collaboration on shared hosting is only. It’s limited to two users and there is also a method for the hosts to either enable that or disable the real time collaboration. So it might not be as obvious when you go on your site and looking for it. You might not be able to get real time collaboration out of the box. You might need to connect with your host to let that enabled because it’s such an additional load on a server. That certain server configurations are not meant for it to be in yet. So if you’re on a virtual private host, I think I mentioned it before, it wouldn’t. It was a different scenario. But it’s probably easier to get the collaboration working than if you are on a shared hosting with 10,000 websites on a. On a server where the hosting company will probably restrict that.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I think that there’s going to be a lot of shifts in hosting, either requirements, configuration, pricing options, etc. as a result of all of these changes. And I don’t know what they’re going to be yet, but we do need to collectively remember that the AI features, the collaboration components, all of those things are resource intensive and are going to shift how hosting is being utilized and therefore the hosts are going to need to respond in order to account for the actual cost of that change. So I think that’s a big unknown right now and I think it’s, you know, there’s a few hosts where they’re locking in pricing for a few years, which is cool, but at the same time I’m like, I don’t know, in three years is this going to be enough to pay for that? What will it be in three years?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: So I think there’s a shift coming there and I am not gonna even pretend to know enough about all the details to know exactly how that’s going to play out, but I think that there’s enough shift in what types of resources we need from our hosting that there will be a shift. There has to be, because it’s just so much more resource intensive than what we’ve been doing in the past collectively.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that is in line with what you said at the beginning, that the PHP requirements. Yeah, it always is also contributing to that because all the newer features. So there might be a. You can’t upload upgrade to 7.0 until you update your PHP. That’s totally sure.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. And I’ve read that somewhere. Somewhere I did read that there’ll be security releases on 6.9 for sites that can’t go, you know. But then you end up with a situation where you’re gonna. How many sites are gonna be stuck on 6.9 forever?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But that has been a problem. Yeah. Because the security team is actually backporting, although officially the release is only supported to 6.8 or something like that, but security team actually backported all the security updates that came with 6.3 or 6.4 to 4 point something. WordPress 4 point something is probably 15 years old. So it’s still getting security updates. So that definitely is a backwards compatibility promise that even the security team there. It takes a lot of time to backport that. And John Blackburn, one of the leads on the security team, has actually done a retrospective of the latest security updates because you saw that too. It was a. It’s kind of a galore of releases. 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 7.4 beta. Yeah, it kind of was in within three days, I think there were four releases.

Beth Soderberg: It was a lot. Yes. All at once.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I had a meetup here in Munich and we talked about it. I think the day the 6.4 came out that they were saying, well, is it all hacked or what happened here? Kind of how often do I have to update my WordPress site in a day? And he did a nice retrospective or explaining what happened and what was the reason for that. I’ll link it in the show notes if you’re interested. To listeners, it will probably be a little bit less prominent because of all the death notes that came out, but it’s on the blog on Core.

Beth Soderberg: I’m going to go back and listen to that because that hit during a particularly busy time, just for me personally in general. And so it was a little whiplashy to be like what is going on over there? And I think it will be good to be able to go back and just review so that I am aware moving forward of what exactly happened there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And back to Gutenberg 22.8. I mentioned it before. There is a feature that implements the state UI for sudo selectors in the global styles. Maggie Cabrera mentioned that in the last episode. It’s now available in the Gutenberg plugin so you can test it out. It gives you a. In the global styles on the right hand side you can select the design for your pseudo selectors like hover and focus and all that. It’s really cool. Hover, focus, Focus, visible and active. Yeah, so you can change all those settings for buttons, for instance. And you don’t have to use theme JSON for it anymore. So this is pretty cool.

Beth Soderberg: Yes. And then this one, I think this is fascinating. There is a PR adding client side navigation block with interactive features. That just sounds really fun to experiment with. So what it’s doing is adding a variant to the Create Block interactive template that allows you to add client side navigation. So this is starting to support the again supporting the infrastructure that exists with actual tooling and UI to use it. So the way that it describes it, this variant provides a self contained working example that mirrors real world patterns, query parameter navigation for pagination, search results, filtered archives and works immediately after scaffolding with no posts or setup required. That’s really cool. That’s a really nerdy and very arcane and wonderful. So I’m excited about that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that variant is for the Create block scaffolding feature, if I understood this correctly. Yeah, it’s a create block latest. So if you create a custom block, you can have the variant for your client side navigation and scaffold that up. That’s really cool. Yeah. Well, our developer advocacy team, we are working on a so-called showcase for all the good things that you could do with a website or theme, including some of the interactivity API features. And we will probably release that someday in the next two months I would think. And it will be a music site with albums and musicians and artists and using the tabs and using the playlist and block and then also kind of have some interesting changes in the theme. So it’s for custom post types and all that. So it’s going to be really cool. I know that Juan Ma Garrido who put the client side navigation template into the gray block scaffolding, he’s also creating a plugin to have the music play even if you navigate away from that page that had the list of the music. So it’s kind of really interesting to see. So you could use it for video and music. So things stay on the forefront on your browser even if you look at other pages on the website. So that’s one of the features.

Beth Soderberg: The person, the, the part of me that likes to listen to podcasts from the website themselves really appreciates this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I, I definitely, once it’s out, I definitely gonna adopt it for the good changelog podcast.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think always through, we are through with booked. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Lots of little, little things, but those are the big exciting things, I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there were actually 38 PRs that were backported as bug fixes to 7.0. So it’s still an ongoing work that is coming out in two weeks and people are still fixing it.

All right, well, I wish you and your agency all the best for that release that all the things that come in don’t disrupt your work or the work of your clients.

Beth Soderberg: We have a list. We know where to look for the problem.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yeah. Well, I’m so happy that you were on the show with me. And as always, dear listeners, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com podcast this is episode 129 and if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelogutenbergtimes.com that’s changelogutenbergtimes.com so thank you for listening and I wish you all a great weekend. Well, or next week. And also toy, toy for the WordPress 7.0 release updates. We will hear each other again in four weeks once I get back from WordCamp Asia. And then we’ll tackle what’s coming in 7.1 and what has been in. Good work. Plugin 22.9 and 23.0.

Thank you so much. Beth Soderberg, it was wonderful to have you and your perspective and your opinions on the show.

Beth Soderberg: Thank you for having me. It was great to be here and to see you again and I wish you safe travels on all of your continuing travels.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you. All right. Yeah, and you take care. And I’ll put in the show notes how people can connect with you.

Beth Soderberg: Sounds good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Of course. All right, you take care. Bye Bye.

Beth Soderberg: Bye bye. Thanks, everybody.