WP Mainline Episode 3 – Guess Who’s Back, Back Again

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode three of WP mainline for Friday, July 16th, 2021. I am your host, Jeff challenged joined by Malcolm Peralta. My favorite Canadian. How are you doing Malcolm? I'm doing well and yourself. Um, I'm, I'm doing a lot better than I was about a year ago. I spent a little over a year since we've done this. You know, the recipe for success is probably not do a podcast or two, you know, every year you should probably go an exchange. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, uh, yeah, back in the hosting chair and a shout out to everybody who sent me messages saying they really missed the show and I've had some people contact me saying that, uh, they've actually gone through podcasts withdraw since, uh, this is WordPress weekly kind of kick the bucket. Uh, so there's a lot of people that said they enjoyed just hearing us riff on WordPress news and talk about whatever. And they just liked the casual nature of the chill. So thank you very much. Uh, you're many of those people, part of the reason why I'm back and I'm going to try and do this again and, uh, uh, we'll see what happens. See if I can't make a go out of it. Yeah. I'm excited. Yeah. And you're one of those guys. You're one of those guys that get pushed. We get, bring it back, bring it back. Let's go. So, okay. Speaker 2 00:01:34 It's just so I could be here and do this with you. That's why. Speaker 1 00:01:36 Well, I mean, that's as good a reason as ever, I guess. So we do have some things to talk about in WordPress's land. And the first thing I want to talk about is, uh, will commerce, uh, the, the team behind WooCommerce, they discovered a critical vulnerability, um, uh, back on July 13, 20, 21, uh, critical vulnerability concerning WooCommerce in the WooCommerce blacks feature was identified and was responsibly disclosed by security reach researcher, judge via the hacker one security program. And for those who don't know, I hecka one security program. That's like a automatic assigned into that, where they issue bounties for, uh, security issues and bugs that are discovered and confirmed. It's nice little program that they have there. And when it works, when everything works and disclosure and all that thing happens responsibly, it's, it's a great, it's a great setup. Uh, but if you have a WooCommerce store, what you should be doing or probably should have been done already is that you use the upgrade to the latest versions of both WooCommerce and WooCommerce blocks. Speaker 1 00:02:39 And what they ended up doing was this critical vulnerability. They actually went back and passed it through. It was like over 90 releases, 90 versions. Uh, so this is a pretty serious and actually have a detailed chart in the post, uh, in terms of which versions, which, uh, WooCommerce versions were patched, which versions are, they will commerce blocks, feature plugin was patched. Uh, so this came out and about, uh, so basically if you haven't done so already, double-check your client's sites. If you manage through commerce, if you run route commerce, make sure that it is updated to the latest version so that you don't succumb to, uh, this vulnerability. And up to this point, it looks like no data, no customer data that they can, that they've been able to find out has been compromised. So that's a good thing, but a lot of, a lot of concerned users and people, and, uh, I know a lot of people who spent their evening, the other night working on their customers who commerce sites. Yeah. I mean, it Speaker 2 00:03:44 Shouldn't have been a big deal, right. They, they pushed out automatic updates for the versions that they thought were affected by this. Right. Um, so a lot of people probably had an automatic patch happen if you had like, um, different systems in place to stop automatic patching from happening. Uh, you'll definitely want to get on that for me. One of the big issues was, uh, I have a couple of client sites that run WooCommerce and updating them as a bit of a painful process. And the reason for that is, um, not all of the add-ons or extensions or whatever you want to call them for blue commerce are as well developed as WooCommerce itself. And so when we upgrade the WooCommerce version, sometimes those other things get broken, especially functionality like integration with payment systems, especially things like written, you know, by like a one man person like Shaw or, or one person. Speaker 2 00:04:35 And then you end up with a broken WooCommerce store and you have to kind of roll back and you have to upgrade to the, um, patched sub version that they've released. So let's say you're on like four.four.zero or four.four.one. They released a four dot four dot two. But if you click upgrade and we're in like WordPress's administration panel, that you're going to upgrade to five.five.one, um, there's no like version selector built into WordPress to let you like pick and choose which point release you want to upgrade to. Um, and so that could mean like a lot of people aren't necessarily just dealing with upgrades. They're also dealing maybe with critical, um, issues now on their sites because you know, the plugins or add-ons for e-commerce that they were using might not be working the same way. And it shouldn't be that way because this vulnerability was a specific patch by itself. So this code would be fairly safe to go ahead and upgrade to. Um, but yeah, just double check everything before you upgrade maybe on a staging site or something and, but get it done quickly. But Speaker 1 00:05:33 What have we learned in the past about security updates and WordPress, it should work should, it should work most of the time. It does. Most of the time everything works, but then there are those times where things are broken or plugins don't work or something is broken in WordPress that the security patch probably should have had no reason to affect, but yet it did. Yeah. So do you have a, do you have like a staging site or whatever set up for, for client sites, whatever, and you you're messing around on there. I mean, obviously you got to do that because doing anything on a live site is just ask us to trouble, Speaker 2 00:06:10 Especially a lot e-commerce site. Right. It gets to be very complicated at that point. So yeah. We typically downtime Speaker 1 00:06:16 Equals big time loss of revenue. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:06:19 Yeah. We'll close. We'll clone. The live site we'll update it. We'll like typically create like a test product that we can go through the entire like purchasing process with, um, and like use a, you know, a lot of things like Stripe and other services give you like, um, like staging or test site, uh, API connections. So you can run fake transactions, but make sure everything's working correctly. And so we'll set that all up and it's a little bit, a little bit more involved than just clicking update in WordPress. Speaker 1 00:06:44 So, so, so again, if you haven't already, double-check make sure get those WooCommerce sites upgraded. Um, so automatic has stepped into the podcast game. Actually, they haven't really stepped in. They, uh, ex was it earlier this year? It was either earlier this year or last year they acquired a, uh, a company that actually can turn your blog posts into podcasts. Right. But today the news came out that a podcast app packet cast has been acquired, uh, by WordPress. Um, oh, not by WordPress, but automatic, the parent company of calm. Yeah. Well boy, look, I just, I just did something that I ridicule all other news agencies do a welcome betcha. You stepped in a big time now. Ah, yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:07:34 I mean this, this announcement, uh, and we'll kind of go into this a little bit in more detail going forward, but, um, I don't know how I feel about them kind of stretching beyond, you know, WordPress centric stuff. Right. I get that they want to get into the audio space, but how long until, you know, they acquire like a small video side or, um, you know, other things in the space to try to kind of extend their tendrils out into, um, more different like multimedia avenues. I had never heard of this app before. I don't know about you. Speaker 1 00:08:08 It it's, it's funny at one point I'm like pocket cast, packer cast, what is it? And then, and then as I was reading the article, I'm like, man, I can't remember using it. And I looked at my iPhone, oh, I have it installed on my iPhone. And I remembered that the last time I used packet cast, uh, it was suggested to me, uh, by a couple of folks last year when I was having issues or not last year, but when I was doing the WordPress weekly podcast, I was experiencing problems and I was trying to diagnose them and I was using the pocket cast app. So I haven't, the app has been here on my phone, but I haven't used it in like three years. Speaker 2 00:08:40 Yeah. And I can see where there's synergies between like the day one journaling app and like their, all of the stuff that they're doing in terms of like converting blog posts into podcasts. I can see the synergies, but it's, it's still kind of a weird acquisition. Don't you think? Speaker 1 00:08:54 I, most of the time, automatic acquires these companies that I've never heard of. And I'm, I think they're all weird, but you know, some, at some point there's, there's synergies, there's, there's something there, whether it's the founders, whether it's the employees, there's something that they acquire that makes sense or else they wouldn't have done it, I suppose. Speaker 2 00:09:13 That's true. I just don't know that we needed them to buy some kind of second tier second rate podcast management app for mobile devices. I don't know. I guess we'll have to wait and see what they do with it. Speaker 1 00:09:25 Um, but as in the announcement, automatic, uh, in the post says that packet cast will continue to provide you with the features needed to until your favorite podcast or find something new. Uh, they're going to work on, um, building deep integrations with wordpress.com, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts. And the co-founders Russell, Ivan, Nick and Phillip Simpson will continue to leave pocket cast as part of automatic. So it's very good that you're staying on board to work with the product, but you know, when these acquisitions happen, you got to give it a year. Maybe you got to give a year and a half. I don't get excited anymore when automatic acquires a company or, uh, you know, especially when it relates to a mobile app or something, because what happens is, uh, you know, they'll say that people are staying on board and they say that they're going to leave the product alone. But it just seems like over time, people move on, people associated with the product, get into other teams, they start doing other things because, you know, what's, what's the point. They no longer have to focus on that. One thing that they started, that they built that project and sometimes the product gets forgotten about, or it's on the side. And so you really got to give these acquisitions time. No, but a year or two. And, and then kind of look back and say, Hmm, was that a good idea? I don't know. Speaker 2 00:10:45 Yeah. And speaking of acquisitions, I mean, that kind of leads into our next thing to talk about, which is a post status has actually released a list of acquisitions. And of course it's only the big ones. I mean, it doesn't list like every acquisition in the WordPress space ever, but it lists a lot of the bigger ones. And I mean, you're right. If you actually go to this list and like, look at some of the products that automatic has acquired, especially kind of in that early to mid days, um, you will kind of scratch your head because a lot of these don't exist anymore. A lot of them, um, are gone or dead or dying or, you know, otherwise kind of forgotten about, and it's Speaker 1 00:11:24 This acquisition list I know exactly who was responsible for this. Mr. David Bisset, uh, he's over there. He's one of the content producers, content managers for post status. And he's been joking. I thought it was just kind of a joke he was doing about base since last acquisition. But here they're doing a whole big thing now and post status.com, which is actually pretty cool to have sort of this list of acquisitions. And if you go back, like you said, back in the day, and we're talking 2007, 2008, uh, someone sent me to the days of the whole WordPress scene, but you got Gravatar, that's still around a pole, daddy. They're still around with they've, they've rebranded to a different name, pole, something intends to bait. That was their big kind of third-party comma team platform that's actually store around. But you don't see, it's kind of in the background, very low key, uh, buddy press. Speaker 1 00:12:17 That's still alive doing well after the deadline that kind of hit the kibosh. There's not really anything going on with, after the deadline. And then you get into like blogs and, and Blinky code garage, some of the other stuff's Imperium simple note. I think that's still going around, um, long read, scroll kit, creative market theme. Oh, wait a minute. I'm sorry. I'm starting to name things that weren't acquired by automatic. There's a, there's a list of different WordPress companies in here that have done different acquisitions. My bad. It does. It does bring up a good point though. Like how much should Speaker 2 00:12:53 Automatic be purchasing in the WordPress space? Right. Like I get that there are founders that probably are looking for exits, but I mean, will WordPress kind of become, you know, synonymous with automatic? Um, will we see, Speaker 1 00:13:09 Wait, wait, wait, what's the question you just asked, will Speaker 2 00:13:12 We see WordPress becomes synonymous with automatic Speaker 1 00:13:17 Already the case. And I think, I think that's kind of already a thing has been a thing. I don't know that it, Speaker 2 00:13:24 Well, I think there are a group of people that don't necessarily feel or see it that way. Um, and I think that if it was that way, we wouldn't see as much investment from like liquid web and GoDaddy. And some of these other organizations trying to kind of carve out their own like acquisition portfolio or grow their own, um, you know, inroads into WordPress. Speaker 1 00:13:46 But I mean, I mean, Speaker 2 00:13:47 If eventually we might get to the point where it's automatic, uh, liquid web, uh, GoDaddy, and maybe one or two other companies that really kind of own the bulk of the business of WordPress. And that's kind of weird to me, that's kind of scary in a way, Speaker 1 00:14:02 Follow the money who has the money, the web hosts. And who's at the top of the food chain when it comes to WordPress web host, because without the web host, you can't do anything with WordPress. Speaker 2 00:14:13 Yeah. And isn't that the truth, right? I mean, that is kind of wordpress.com claim to fame. I mean, they have like WordPress hosting, quote unquote at every kind of price level. So, you know, from entry-level all the way up to, um, you know, major corporations that are using, um, automatics platform, Speaker 1 00:14:29 The whole WordPress VIP experience, they have a whole VIP platform. I wonder how they're, uh, I think it was the business class or business type service where they actually allowed certain plugins to be used on purpose, like how you can actually upload or install certain plugins to wordpress.com site. I think it was part of their business plan. I wonder how that's been doing for them. Speaker 2 00:14:49 And I mean, even, even above that press VIP has, has pretty much always had that. And the only requirement was you didn't have to pick from a specific list, but instead you had to pay for automatic to like do a code audit to make sure that the plugin was good enough to be on their platform and wasn't going to wreck the user experience or the server issues or whatever. Right. So, I mean, I'm not surprised that they're allowing that to kind of slowly filter down to some lower levels because plug-ins are one of the big things that people love. And it's so funny because forever in wordpress.com we've been saying, oh yeah, wordpress.com is great, except you can install plugins and you only have a select set of themes you can pick from, and that is soon not going to be the case at all. And so that, that blurred blind, that we've always had to be able to help people understand the difference between wordpress.com, wordpress.org, Mike kind of disappear. Speaker 1 00:15:39 And speaking of acquisitions and plugins, if you take a look at a company like awesome motive, I said, bulky, they've got a whole portfolio now of plugins that they've acquired. Um, and there's a couple of other folks out there who also are starting to build up their portfolio of various WordPress plugins. And in fact, there's a service that was launched, uh, very recently that is all about helping people acquire things in the WordPress space. I can't think of the name of it off the top of my head, but, uh, uh, it's, it's there and it exists, uh, uh, acquiring, you know, that's what I gotta do. I gotta, I gotta build up every P mainland to get acquired again. The, I should go down that road again. Yeah. But, uh, yeah. So we'll have to see what happens. A tumbler still around tumbler. Hasn't gone down the wayside and they were acquired by automatic. Speaker 1 00:16:33 So that's a good sign. I mean, and most of it, most of the, most of the products and services automatic has acquired recently, I'd say within the past three or four years, they're still doing pretty good. I agree. Yep. So we're press 5.8 release candidate four was released the other day. The tentative released date for WordPress 5.8 is July 20th, 2021. And I gotta be honest with you. I have no idea what features are in WordPress. Five 20. I've been so busy with my head, stuck up. WordPress is trying to figure out WP mainline and trying to get the site work in. I've dealt with bugs, I've dealt with issues. I've, I've written a couple of things I'm trying to get this membership thing underway. And every time I think I have it figured out, Nope, something else comes along or I think about doing something else. Speaker 1 00:17:21 I have no idea what isn't WordPress 5.8. However, I do know that it's expected to be released July 20th. So you should be prepared. There is a blog post that you can look up on WordPress at org, the WordPress 5.8 beta one post that actually has a good outline of what to expect. And what does 5.8? And of course you've got things dealing with blocks, block patterns, um, support for internet Explorer will be ending this year in WordPress. Uh, this release will be kind of the first stages of that by by internet Explorer. You know, I never used the new net Explorer. It came with, came with windows. If the only time I ever used it was when all the other browsers I had stopped working. I was trying to troubleshoot, troubleshoot something. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:18:05 I don't know how I feel about 5.8 yet. I, uh, I'm a little bit concerned about the whole full site editing in Gutenberg thing. I, I know a lot of developers who, you know, know that Gutenberg is the future. They are excited about Gutenberg's future, but they just shake their heads. Actually, I talked to one today who was just like, Speaker 1 00:18:22 Why didn't they develop Gutenberg to be mobile Speaker 2 00:18:25 First, like mobile responsive. First, every time I want to do something in Gutenberg, I have to like reinvent the wheel for responsive blocks and stuff like that. And he's just so frustrated and that's not the way it should be. And so then we extend that to full site editing and like, you know, the blurring of the lines between widgets and blocks. And I dunno, I just, I'm a little, I'm a little confused about this. I'm looking forward to seeing it mature, but right now we're at that awkward teenage point for, uh, or maybe even preteen point for Gutenberg, in my opinion. Speaker 1 00:18:55 And that's after Gutenberg has been worked on for at least what five years now, four or five years, I think, I think it's been about that long, but you mentioned a big time feature. That's coming to WordPress five point that is blacks and the widget area. So people will be able to use any block in your themes, widget areas, using the all new widget screen and updated customizer. Now existing third-party widgets should continue to work via the legacy widget block. And if you're not ready for the full switch, you can use the classic widgets plugin. Oh my goodness. And themes to call on a specific function. It's widgets black editor to, uh, I guess use the old screen, use the old UI. So as they're trying to rebuild the ship of Theseus or whatever, that the same one as a that's, you know, reinventing WordPress as is without building something new, this is their way to basically it's black editor and classic editor thing all over again. But now with widgets, Speaker 2 00:19:55 You know, I still have like one or two clients that are using the classic editor. And I, I tell them all the time, you'd know this is going to be deprecated at some point, right? They are going to force you to learn how to use Gutenberg blocks. Like they're going to stop maintaining this classic editor plugin. At some point you should probably switch or like, Hey, you know, that new functionality or feature you want, it's now only like available as a Gutenberg block or something like that. Right. I've been working so hard to try to get them off to the classic editor plugin. And now they come along with the classic widget thing. And I'm just like, okay, at least, at least this is not as user facing as the classic editor, but it's just like, can we not move away from these horrible classic whatever plugins and just, you know, if you want to stick with the old classic thing, maybe you find non WordPress CMS to run Speaker 1 00:20:47 It. I know exactly what you do migrate to classic press. So everything is classic. There you Speaker 2 00:20:53 Go. It's built in all the time. Classic. Exactly. Speaker 1 00:20:55 See man, we're on top of things here at classic process, still kicking. They're still doing that. And the last time I checked, I was checking out their plugin directory. They've got about somewhere around a hundred, maybe a little over a hundred plugins on their plugin directory for classic press. Uh, so and ethicacy, I think classic press existing is a good thing. I think, uh, as long as the maintainers keep it around, I mean, I think it fits a niche and this niche for a, for a subset of people. And, and when it comes to the Gutenberg, the black editor, a tremendous amount of work has been done on the black editor. It is not as horrible and as terrible as you might see the reviews on a WordPress site or directory for the plugin plugin, it's nowhere near like that. I mean, when it works, it works. It's cool. You know, it actually has a nice flow, but through those times when it doesn't work, which I could talk about in an instance that I ran into it's. Speaker 1 00:21:57 Uh, but, uh, yeah. Yeah. So are you using full site editing? Widgets are using plastic widgets. That's a question now you're going to have to be asking and if you're a plugin developer, oh. Or maybe even, well, I'd say plugin developer, because usually plugin or widgets are dealing with plugins, not so much themes, but, but yeah. I mean, we're going to get to the point. I mean, when they say full site editing and I haven't looked into it that deeply, I, the first thing I think of, well, okay, I'm going to be able to use blocks everywhere on the site. There's not going to be any limitation, snap bar, a block sidebar, a block content is a blind photos, a block block here, black there blocks everywhere. I mean, that's, that's what I think of as we'll say editing. Speaker 2 00:22:47 Yeah. But it's creating a new, interesting problem, right? Because block patterns and like custom blocks related to themes are going to become the new locked in some blocks, right? Like you're going to build out this beautiful site using this block plugin you found, right? Like, you know, there, there are hundreds of them already. And then one day you're going to want to change themes or you're going to want to get to, you know, change plugins maybe because they stopped supporting it. Maybe because they go in a direction you don't like, and you're going to switch plugins. You're gonna switch teams and everything is going to be ugly and broken and stupid. And you're going to go, this is just like back when I turned off like divvy or switched away from WP bakery or whatever. Like it's just going to be that exact same experience all over again. Speaker 1 00:23:29 Uh, we I'm just because I've been around WordPress for so long. It, it, I got the feels, man. I got, then that makes it, yeah, I got the fields. Cause you know, it's like, all right, I built all this stuff, but if I click the activate, oh no. And I always see a short code or the functionality is gone or man, I can't have what I want because I relied on that plugin or theme. Yep. And not now it's going to be like, well, I relied on that block, but you can't have that block. If you can remove this black pattern plugin or something to that effect. Exactly. Same problem, different ingredients, the WordPress story in a nutshell. Uh, uh, so speaking of the black editor, I just kind of wanted to bring this up a little bit, but I've, I've with WP mainline. It's a relatively fresh, well, it's a year old, but in terms of content, it's fresh. Speaker 1 00:24:22 It's pretty much a new WordPress install. And I've been tinkering around with a bunch of things. But I ran into a problem where I was just writing content, simple content in terms of a couple paragraph blacks. But then I was writing the post where I wanted to embed a get hub just that somebody had provided. So what you do is just go to get hub, you get their page, they have the embed code that you can copy and then you can put it into a custom HTML block. And when I would do that and click save, I would see this air at the top of the blackhead. And it says failed to save, uh, updating failed Jason air. Now I have no idea what that means. No, I'm just trying to write a post, uh, what the hell is going on here? So my first thought was, okay, the black editor, here we go again. Speaker 1 00:25:10 Something's broke. The black editor sucks. You know, what am I going to do about this? So I started trying to tinker around trying to figure it out, couldn't that for the life of me, figure it out. And I was getting pretty upset because when you get the updating failed, Jason, err, the content in that post is not saved. Um, it may, it may be there, but if you click refresh or you lost that browser window, you would lose all that content. Um, and this was very frustrating to me, mostly because I'm writing a simple post and the black editor was breaking. I mean like that shouldn't be the case. And for me, I enjoy just like a flow. When you're writing a post, boom, you have a block, you right. Then you have a black, you bed, something, you have a block and then, you know, there's a flow to it. And then once I see the G sign air, everything about creating content is disrupted. And I now have to go into troubleshooting mode and the flow's gone and now I just, I get annoyed and frustrated because now I have to spend all my time and energy trying to figure out what's going on with the black editors. So what happened was all your time Speaker 2 00:26:09 And energy. It only took like what two seconds to figure it out. Right? Cause the air was so detailed and so helpful that you knew exactly what you need. You need to do. Speaker 1 00:26:17 Right. Two seconds more like two weeks. But I ended up working with my host and uh, quite a few people on Twitter helped me out as well. Um, I don't want to go through thrive. I mean, I, I did the usual troubleshooting things, disabled plugins, disabled themes I even went to, uh, and none of that worked here still happened. In fact, even on the same web posts, which is convenient, uh, shout out to them, they've been awesome. Uh, hosting WP, mainline, check them out if you're looking for a great host. Uh, but they actually started a new account, like a trial account on their same setup just to make sure. Cause I figured if it's a hardware issue or a web host issue configuration, then even a new WordPress install should have the same problem, but it worked fine. So I'm like, okay, I have no idea what's going on. Speaker 1 00:27:05 And there's something specifically wrong with my website and I was in the trouble ticket and we're going back and forth and back and forth. And then we ended up finding out through the network tab, the inspection tools in the browser with that air. We found out that, uh, it was triggering a cloud cloud CloudFlare air. And so you can actually see the air where CloudFlare has blocked certain activity from happening. And eventually what happened was just got elevated to the top tier person, Tom, at a convenience. I think he's one of the co-founders of, of uh, the, uh, uh, CEO or can Vizio. So we stepped in and he helped me out and he said, he said, what was going on? Was that, uh, essentially the auto save. So I believe it's related to heartbeat. It is part of the issue, but when you're in the browser or in a black editor, there's a lot of auto saves that that happens. Speaker 1 00:28:03 So there's, there's just pinging of a URL. And I guess what was happening was when I tried to embed a, just in that code in the custom HTML block, the auto-save URL was, oh, the auto save function was happening so often that CloudFlare thought that some kind of attack was going on. They, they, so what they're using, they're using the enterprise edition of CloudFlare, the premium edition, uh, they're using these oys default rule sets, security rule sets. And one of them is configured to say, Hey, if this thing is happening to block it. Uh, so what we ended up having to do is we wait-listed my IP, which I don't think is a long-term solution, but it's working for now, but I do have a plugin installed. It says, uh, Gutenberg disable auto save. So now the autosave is not happening all of the time, but it turns out this has happened, uh, to quite a few others as well, who are using CloudFlare and getting that Jason air in, uh, Gutenberg in the rule actually is XSS HTML injection script tags. Speaker 1 00:29:09 So that's like a role that you can actually disable and CloudFlare. But at the end of the day, what, what happens is, is it was a security issue. It was something out of my control as a user. It was related to the web host, had nothing to do with the plugin and nothing to do with the theme. And most importantly, that I figured out it had nothing to do with Gutenberg, the black editor or WordPress. This is all just a security issue with CloudFlare and mystery solved. It took about three weeks, but damn, I'm happy. I solved the mystery. I a, I feel like I should get a Scooby snack. Speaker 2 00:29:44 Now you got to wonder though, right? Like I deal with hosting clients all the time and they would not one, they wouldn't have cared what the resolution was. Uh, and two, they definitely would not have followed it along, you know, patiently for three weeks like you did. Speaker 1 00:29:57 Um, I, I think most of them would assume that there's an issue with the black editor and it would have blamed it on the black editor and said, this thing sucks. And that would be, yeah, yeah. That or WordPress Speaker 2 00:30:07 Sucks. Or, or maybe the company that you're hosting with, like they could have blamed, like if, if you had decided to blame, um, Conversio is it, I want Speaker 1 00:30:16 To, I think it's, <inaudible> all right. The bedroom, you Speaker 2 00:30:20 Could've, you could've just as easily blamed them and said, ah, you know, there are stupid web hosts. They don't know what they're doing kind of thing. And, and that really is not the reality of the situation at the end of the day. Um, you follow this through to its conclusion, which is great, and you got a detailed post about it, which is great because honestly, I know I've experienced myself and probably hundreds of other people have as well with Jason errors in the block editor. And guess what? It's not always CloudFlare, but sometimes it is. And this is just another one of those cases where WordPress should almost take a whole, like maybe five dot nine should be like clarifying errors. You know what I mean? Like just, just give me more insight into what this error means because this, this Jason error in Gutenberg happens for multiple different reasons. Speaker 2 00:31:03 And so if you go and search it in Google, you might, you might come up with a whole bunch of different solutions. And now you've got to work through each solution trying to figure out which one could be affecting you. And that really sucks. So better error reporting in WordPress in the administration panel would be super helpful because you should've had more insight without having to dig in to kind of the network responses from CloudFlare to figure it out, right? Like it should have been able to give you some insight that, Hey, you know, there's something blocking the script tag or Hey, uh, autosave is no longer working because of something like it, it just, I don't know what the solution is, cause I'm not a developer and I will, I'd be the first to admit that I'm not, you know, an expert network. Speaker 1 00:31:44 No, what it should say, it should just turn into a white screen and say cheating. Huh? Oh my goodness. But Speaker 2 00:31:50 Errors like this has always been a problem in WordPress. And I don't think we necessarily spend enough time as a community, um, helping users resolve these. And I think too many things have the exact same error from a user perspective that just causes a whole bunch of confusion and frustration for, for little to no reason, in my opinion. Speaker 1 00:32:10 Yeah. So if you ended up, ended up seeing like the, or Jason updating field, Jason air, you can't click on it. There's no link. It's a red bar you're stopped in your tracks. It won't save content. You're pretty much SLL until you figure out what's going on there. And if you don't, if you're not on top of your game and you don't hit control, control a to select all copy and post that content, you've already written into a poster and open editor, you're at risk of losing it. Uh, so yeah, I mean, I, when I saw that air, like, what am I supposed to do with this? And when you put that air in a Google, guess what pages upon pages upon pages of what could be CloudFlare could be this security issue could be, this plugin could be really simple. SSL could be an option here could be an option there. Speaker 2 00:32:54 Don't forget to resave your permalinks Speaker 1 00:32:56 Up, which I did. And there's a lot of other things I ended up having to troubleshoot that. Uh, yeah. And at one point, you know, I'm starting to, I'm starting to wonder make man, I get this WordPress site set up and it feels like it's built on sticks, bubble gum and duct tape. I don't, it feels very French, but no, I ended up getting it fixed. And uh, I just wanted to document this and say, Hey, if you have a Jason here, it could very well, you know, this is, this is a possibility, this is not an option. In fact, in my research, there are quite a few, there's a history of cloud security services like CloudFlare and their, their, um, their firewall, their WAF, triggering issues, just normal functions. You know, whether it mostly JavaScript related because there's a lot of JavaScript of all the Gutenberg where things just stopped or an auto save is blocked or certain code is blocked. Or if you're trying to do something within a block, that code is blocked and you ended up just seeing the Jason, Aaron. No, it, it, it really sucks for the user at that point because it's a stop sign. There's no, it's up to you to figure out what to do from there on out, you know, WordPress is, and I help you. Speaker 2 00:34:08 Yeah. And hopefully you have a good host that can, and I absolutely Speaker 1 00:34:11 Do. And when it got, when it got, uh, up the chain of the time and he's like, oh, let me just do this. And as soon as he, um, turned off the Gutenberg save feature, and then he wait-listed, my IP things started working again. I'm like, oh, this is so great because you know, Hey, all I want to do is embed something using a block. Why do I get this error? You know, it shouldn't be this way, but no, it's just the way CloudFlare works. And Tom's one of those guys. He thinks that because this is a default role, like in the Owasso rule set for CloudFlare, for their premium thing, he thinks that maybe there's a, there's a way that we're pressed could solve the issue, by the way it's doing auto saves or something to that effect where it doesn't trigger that rule. Interesting thought. Ah, alright. So that pretty much covers what's been going on here. Oh, really? We covered Speaker 2 00:35:04 The entire year of news and this one episode. No, Speaker 1 00:35:06 No, no, just what's been going on lately, but I just want to talk a little bit about, you know, I been so long since people have heard my voice. It's been so long since I've talked to a microphone has been so long since I've seen you, who has no hair, but we're not going to go into that. But, um, so I've got WP mainline up and going. I, my initial plan is to turn it into a membership site or a subscription site. Uh I'm I'm working on that right now. I've got some people that are rooting for me. They're cheering me on there to help me, Jason Coleman of pain membership pro he's. He's been awesome. He's been walking me through some things and trying to get things set up. And I, I just don't know. I, I think I had things figured out in terms of how I want to cite the role, but then I don't, like at first I was thinking about setting up membership, subscriber roles, and then those subscribers would have access to exclusive content, whether that be an after show, WP mainline or exclusive exclusive blog posts. Speaker 1 00:36:02 But then I started thinking about like, you know, what the hell am I going to write a, what am I going to say or do that's exclusive content. I want that stuff to be in front of as many people. And I want the show to be as less listened to by as many people as possible. So I'm like, well, I can either the option I could do there is just turn the whole site into a subscription only type of site. That way kind of everything is exclusive if you thought about it. And that way I don't have to worry about doing these extra special little things. I could just create content, just do my thing. And I don't have to do any of these special content thing. So I'm, I'm working with that. I don't know which way to go here with what subscribers and members and, uh, I just need funding. I need money and then I need the money so I could produce content. Then I can have a job. And then we could just all be happy. Speaker 2 00:36:53 Yeah, I completely understand. And I think that, you know, I, I think that in some ways you're overthinking it. Yeah. You have a lot of people that really want to see you succeed. I think that you just need to kind of put it out there, see what sticks be ready to change on a dime. If it's not working the way you hope it will, but give things a little bit time to breathe. I mean, you got this, we're all here for you, man. You, you, Speaker 1 00:37:13 You can do this. I can do it. Hey, it's kind of like, I would not, I would be remiss to not mention that. I feel a bit, like I mentioned this on Twitter. I feel a bit like Brian Crowe's guide when he launched post status back in 2013, because at that time I was fully employed under Matt for WP Tavern. I had a job at, uh, I was working, I was writing and there he was doing something independent, launching his own thing, having an independent voice. And then two years later he launched a post status membership club. And there was a lot of people that were cheering him on. I saw how the community responded to him and he did an awesome job. The guy's a smart chap. He did a lot of things that I wish I could have did with, uh, him and Ryan email from way back in the day. Speaker 1 00:37:59 Ryan was a smart dude too, uh, with, uh, uh, well, um, how many out themed WP? Uh, no. Cause he did the quarterly, which was to print magazine. That was awesome. I still have the one and only issue pretty much in pristine condition behind me. Uh, but, uh, but yeah, I, I'm kind of going down the route of, uh, Brian Crowe's guard here and you know, I've been told that that's not a bad path to go down, so I'm working on it hopefully by next week, you know, I can open up the site. Uh, it started getting some rolling in and just kind of get back to writing and pocking because that's what people have missed the most about my absence from, uh, WP weekly and the Tavern. And so that's why I need to get going. I need to start doing that again. Yeah, for sure. So I want you to just come back. Speaker 2 00:38:55 I want a daily podcast, a weekly podcast, a monthly podcast that the after hours one, the, uh, TA like a main line at night, uh, or after dark or whatever I want, uh, Speaker 1 00:39:10 Just more content. So you want me to be Justin that TV just dropped the camera on my head and keep a microphone Speaker 2 00:39:19 By your face just twenty four seven and just like relate everything back to WordPress. You know, you go watch the trains and you're like that one reminds me of this Gutenberg block, Speaker 1 00:39:27 Strange filled with graffiti. So that looks like a client's dashboard. That sounds good. Good. I could do that. I could do that. All right. So the plan is to start doing this show, once again, every Friday, there'll be three main lane podcasts. We're going to start out with that for now. Um, you and John James Jacoby are gonna share co-hosting duties. So if one's not available or if I want to switch it up, that's cool. You guys both add different flavors to the show and I really appreciate it. And other than that, oh, I want to give a shout out to cast dos who has graciously provided me sponsorship in terms of they've given me a pro-level or a paid account for podcast hosting for this show and any additional shows I decide to do there in Castile's. It's really cool. Once you set it up, it's integration with WordPress and their hosting and the additional add ons they have, it's pretty slick. Speaker 1 00:40:24 And in fact, congratulations to cast dos and the folks over there, uh, because they recently got a, almost like 800 grand worth of funding. Wow. So there'll be, there'll be sticking around here for a little while. Of course, paid membership pro I've already mentioned awesome group of folks over there and fees you my host for WP mainland. Thanks a lot for sticking with me and for not thinking I'm an annoying customer because I'm opening up support tickets and asking why isn't this working? Why isn't that working? And they actually just helped me the other day. I had a, uh, issues with redirection code with the cast dose, where people were trying to download the MP3 files and it was showing up as a 4 0 4 error. So they ended up having to get rid of like light like X PPD or whatever it is, uh, install engine ax put in some security rules or not security rules, but redirection rules and bam, it's all fixed. They fixed it for me. So it was really cool. So now I have working downloads for the podcast. Nice. So now you can listen to it and by the way, by the end of today and throughout this weekend, because I forgot to do this last year, uh, the podcast should be available, subscribe to on iTunes, and I'm going to work on getting it to some other distribution channels as well. There's always work to do when you're a solopreneur, for sure. Um, other than that, anything on your end? No, I'm just, Speaker 2 00:41:49 I'm glad to be back and glad to be able to help. And if anyone has any questions or things that they think we should cover, make sure you, uh, reach out to, uh, to Jeff at the WP main line, a Twitter account and let them know about the stories we should cover. And I look forward to covering them all. Speaker 1 00:42:07 Absolutely. So that's going to do it for this week's edition of WP mainline. You can find show notes for this episode and all previous episodes, WP mainline.com. In fact, all you gotta do is visit the site, click on the podcast link and the show notes post and the players and everything you need to know will be right there. Easy access. You can follow WP mainline on Twitter at WP mainline, of course. And how about you? Speaker 2 00:42:32 If you want to follow me, I'm at find purpose on Twitter and, uh, my company has press Titan and I'm also working with, uh, Cambra creative. So Speaker 1 00:42:41 You can reach me there. Nice. And I'm still trying to find purpose, man. We're always trying to find purpose. That's the goal. Yeah. So until next week, everybody have a safe, enjoyable weekend. Everybody hope you enjoy this episode of me being back. I hope you enjoy hearing my voice and, uh, we'll be back again to do it again next week. So long everybody