This Week in WordPress #385

Nathan Wrigley It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 385, entitled Irish Goodbye. It was recorded on Monday, the 19th of October, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by co-host Michelle Frechette, but also by Vito Peleg and Andrew Palmer. It's a WordPress podcast, so we spend most of the time talking about AI. We honestly do get into WordPress-y things as the show goes on.

Nathan Wrigley For example, we talk about what's coming up in Gutenberg 24.2. We talk about the fact that AI is making it easy to make websites, but does that mean that 80% of the work is actually achievable by AI? Web Dev Studios have built an entire website just to prove that it's not. Kathy Zant has got a new community, let's call it that, which she's trying to offer to help people build sites with AI.

Nathan Wrigley Devin Walker has been with Automatic over at the Jetpack side of things for a whole year. What's happened over there? Dave Foy is back and I for one welcome it into the web dev WordPress space. Shopify, WooCommerce, which is leading. Katie Keith has some insights onto that. And we spend a few minutes talking about Show.fm, a brand new podcasting platform which I've built with my good friend, Dan Maybe. I'll be talking about that more in the days, weeks and months to come. Anyway, that's the episode that's ahead of you. I hope that you enjoy it. This Week in WordPress, coming up.

Nathan Wrigley The music is awful, but sometimes it's less awful than other times because that, I don't know if it's just me, but you know, occasionally a thing which is two minutes takes about four seconds and sometimes a thing which takes two minutes takes about three hours. That was one of the four second variants.

Michelle Frechette Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley That just sort of seriously disappeared. Hello. It's episode number 385. Live. Of This Week in WordPress, which is rather a lot. Sometimes I question my sanity.

Nathan Wrigley But here we are.

Andrew It's not just you.

Nathan Wrigley Thank you. That's good. I'm pleased to hear it. The dulcet tones of Andrew Palmer there, and we'll go around our little group in a moment and say hi to everybody. But before we do that, just a few bits of housekeeping, if that's okay with everybody. The first thing to mention is if you're watching this anywhere other than YouTube or the WP Builds Live page, don't comment because the comments don't come to us.

Nathan Wrigley So if you're in Twitter or LinkedIn or anything like that, it'll just be a... You'll comment and it'll, you know, it'll appear in the thread over there, but we won't see it. So the best thing to do is to head to wpbuilds.com, go to this URL, wpbuilds.com forward slash live. And if you go over there, there's a little live chat widget inside the video. Top right says live chat. Or you can use the YouTube comments embedded on the right-hand side a little bit. Mr. Richmond, Elliot Richmond, saying hi, folks. And also, oh, Andrew's got the measure of it. Look, there he is. So do that. And if you go to one of those two places, you can actually have your voice heard. So wpbuilds.com forward slash live. Or go to the YouTube channel.

Nathan Wrigley Hello, says Taco. Good to see you all. Whoever is typing, if they wouldn't mind just pressing mute, that would be great because it's really loud. Anybody else getting the keyboard in their ears? I'm getting it.

Andrew It's very soft laptop. Yeah, I'll stop doing it. I'm a newbie to podcasting. Sorry about that.

Nathan Wrigley It's just fine. Don't you worry about it. So there's the bits of housekeeping. So in that case, what we'll do is we will go around the houses and say hi to everybody. Firstly, we'll go. Go there. Actually, let me remove that caption first. Yes, sorry. What's going on? I can't make Taco go away. Oh, it's because there's another one hiding behind it. Wait a second. Make that one go away. There we go. How are you doing, Michelle?

Michelle Frechette I am very well, thank you. How are you?

Nathan Wrigley Yeah, good, good, good, good. The weather here is becoming wintry. We had our dalliance with the heat a few weeks ago, and now it's back to normal. Michelle Frechet is the Executive Director of PostStatus. In addition to her work over there, she is the podcast barista at W3 Coffee Talk, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers, WP Career Pages, and sponsor of MeWP. She's also the co-founder of Speed Network Online. She likes to write things, and so is an author, influencer, and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside of Rochester.

Michelle Frechette Rochester. Where she likes to take photographs of nature. And if you want one URL to sum it all up, it's meetmichelle.online.

Nathan Wrigley Yes. Thank you for joining us. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you. And over there, we have Mr. Andrew Palmer. How are you doing, Andrew? I'm very well, thank you. Good to see you. You've always got such a nice, like, Barry White style. Let's go with that. Deep and enjoyable. Delighted to see my former boss and my former co-founder. That's right. You're over him. I don't know if you've noticed. He's dead to me. He's dead to me. He's dead to you. Despite the fact he spent Sunday with it. There's Andrew Palmer anyway. Andrew is a WordPress and SaaS founder. He's an investor and he likes to merge things together through M&As. He's an advisor who's also built and scaled and exited five digital agencies.

Michelle Frechette And anything else you want to add? Because I think you'd want to talk about it. Nothing. Nothing really. I worked with Atterim. I was an investor at Atterim. So it's great to see Vito. We spent all Sunday, last Sunday together. And done. In between cuddling the kids and stuff like that. Went through everything that you're doing. It's great. We had a great Sunday outdoorsy at our rim.

Nathan Wrigley I'm trying to make the answer. Put your hand behind it.

Andrew We decided to change the name.

Andrew There's a new logo already. We decided to change the name. Yeah, change the name to Adarim as people say it.

Nathan Wrigley That's a great episode title. Nathan has out-of-date swag. I like that. I'm trying to remember that one. That's Andrew anyway. Thank you for joining us, Andrew. I appreciate it. Finally, what feels like an ice age ago, Vito Peleg, how are you doing? It's been ages.

Vito Peleg Good. Yes, it's good to be here. I can't believe it's 345. I think I was in episode 35.

Nathan Wrigley Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like that length of time ago. It's an absolute pleasure having you back.

Nathan Wrigley Have you done anything since then? Not really. It's too chilly. I have three kids now. As you say, not children. Oh, kids, businesses, empires. Back then I had none.

Vito Peleg Yeah, I've been busy for sure.

Nathan Wrigley Yeah, life gets in the way. Vito has bought the shortest of a bio, so it'd be really easy to say. Vito is the founder and CEO at Atarim, and I'm just going to add father of, what did

Nathan Wrigley you say, three? Three now, yes. With the latest one joining less than two months ago. Oh, you wait. I, as of this week, I no longer have any children. All of my children have now gone into that kind of buying beer at the pub, being able to vote period in life where they've all become 18. And I tell you, enjoy it, Vito.

Nathan Wrigley It goes, I know everybody says it, right? Everybody says it and you don't quite believe it, but it goes quicker than you think. I can already see. And we'll enjoy that part. I'm, I'm actually... Semi, looking forward to that part already, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, if you like driving people places, it's great. Yeah, I am now a taxi driver to my 24-year-old university daughter. Yeah, it's absolutely crazy.

Nathan Wrigley Anyway, we're going to talk about WordPress-y things, but let's see if anybody has dropped any comments in. Like I said, feel free to drop some comments in if you want.

Nathan Wrigley Taco's the only one so far, well, Andrew has as well, but saying hi to people.

Nathan Wrigley You've been trying for years to make me go away, Nathan. I refuse, so I simply like your customer.

Nathan Wrigley Did I say make Taco go away when I removed your comment?

Nathan Wrigley I believe you did. I'm sorry, Taco. I didn't mean it in that way.

Michelle Frechette And Elliot says hello.

Michelle Frechette Who does? Elliot Richman says hello.

Nathan Wrigley Oh, yeah, we got him. I think, hi there, says Elliot. Yeah, thank you. That's great. And we've got some other comments coming in. There's a little bit of a lag, actually, between the various platforms, but I can see Jackson that says, ciao.

Nathan Wrigley But it hasn't come through to our platform. I don't quite know why that is, Jackson. We sometimes have these problems, but I'll keep my eyes peeled on the actual YouTube comments and what the platform consumes. So the idea is to talk about WordPress-y things. Increasingly, we go off the rails and talk about all sorts of other things as well, including AI quite a lot. But what we tend to do these days is, firstly, have a massive long advert for things that I do. So let's begin there.

Nathan Wrigley Now it's a good time to get your coffee. I'm just kidding. Yeah, you go get coffee. In fact, have a long meal, and then come back and ask.

Nathan Wrigley No, I'll keep it brief. This is us, WP Builds. Stick your email address into there, and I'll send you two emails a week when we produce new content. More recently, we had a hijack episode about Show.fm, which I'm going to get onto in a moment. But the latest and greatest thing at the moment is Black Friday, isn't it? Everybody's sort of gearing up for Black Friday. I expect at Atarim you're doing the same thing. We throw this page together each year, and at the minute, I don't know, I think it's got about 50, 60 deals on there, something like that.