This Week in WordPress #386

Nathan Wrigley It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 386, entitled PHP and AI. It was recorded on Monday, the 26th of October, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by Michelle Frechette and Dave Gray, and by Ivana Kirkovic. We talk a lot about AI towards the end.

Nathan Wrigley We talk about it in terms of the vulnerability in PHP, which was plaguing everybody last week, but also about the fact that it now seems that AI in an MCP way is going to be landing in WordPress core in 7.3. We also talk a lot about other bits and pieces as well. So the WordPress Contributor Toolkit gets a mention, WordPress credits and the fact that they've now got sponsorship tiers, accessibility, the state of contributing in WordPress, ways of hosting your site for free on Cloudflare, Static and various other ways, and a few plugins which we bring to people's attention as well. And it's all coming up next.

Nathan Wrigley On this week in WordPress. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Nice to have you with us. Episode 386, I know, number seems bigger every week. Oh, that's because it is. 386 of this week in WordPress. We're here for about, I don't know, usually it goes on for about 90 minutes, something like that. And we're going to talk about WordPress -y things.

Nathan Wrigley In order to make that happen, I'm joined each week by a panel of fabulous people who give up their time, very graciously, I must say. So, big thank you to them. Let's go round the houses and say hello, and then I'll do a little bit of housekeeping. So, first stop, down there, over there, we've got Michelle Frechette. How are you doing, Michelle? I'm well, thank you. How are you? Yeah, good, good, good, good. No COVID or anything this week. Thank goodness. Yeah, feeling a lot more, a lot more human.

Nathan Wrigley Michelle Frechette is the Executive Director of PostStatus in And in addition to the work over there, she is also the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, WP Speakers, WP Career Pages and SponsorMeWP. She also runs Speed Network Online and writes things, so is an author, influencer and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress tech events.

Nathan Wrigley Living outside of Rochester, New York, she likes to take pictures of nature. And if you want URLs to sum up the whole thing, meetmichelle.online is probably the best one. Thank you for joining us once again. Oh, you've got rid of the blurdy background. That was an Apple thing. All the guitars were blurred. It was a camera thing. Oh, it was a camera thing. Okay. Yeah, so I had to go into my camera and fix things. Also, Michelle fell out of daylight saving.

Nathan Wrigley In the UK, yesterday, we lost... Dave, what did we do? Did we gain an hour? We went back an hour, so we had an extra hour in bed. Okay, so we gained an hour? We gained an hour. I never know when that's happening these days. I was saying to Michelle, it used to be that I'd go around as a child and my job as a kid was to just do all the clocks. So the night before, my parents would tell me, you know, do the clocks, move them back, move them on. I'd go around the house and do the clocks. Nowadays, you wake up and your phone or, you know, your internet connected alarm clock or whatever it may be, it's just fixed, right?

Nathan Wrigley So, anyway, I didn't know and I forgot to tell Michelle about that, so... It's okay. I had an extra hour of prep time this morning. Okay, that's good. That's good. And we're also joined by Dave Gray. Hello, Dave. Hello. Good to be back again. I've got two bios for Dave. I'll read them both, actually, because I had an original one and then Dave updated it because I think he thought that I didn't have the original one, so we'll do them both. Why not? Dave, a.k.a. Friendly Web Guy, is the man behind ToggleWP, easy for me to say, the ToggleWP plugin.

Nathan Wrigley And Website Toolkit SaaS. Actually, they're basically the same, so I'll just add a little bit. Toggle WP is a plugin that helps freelancers turn table stakes WordPress maintenance into a service your clients won't want to leave. And Website Toolkit, a new set of integrated tools to launch client sites with confidence. Yeah, and he's sporting his... I'll do it as much as possible. Can't get the reverse angle right.

Nathan Wrigley Well, thank you for joining us once again, Dave. Appreciate it. Dave's been on the show before. Michelle's been on the show before. But Ivana has never been on the show before. Hello, Ivana.

Ivana Cirkovic Hi. First time charm. Yeah, that's right. And you're looking very like you've been on holiday. Let's put it that way. Yes. Yes, indeed. Really nice. Hi.

Nathan Wrigley Now, the bio I've got is very, very short for Ivana, so I'll just read it out and then you can say a bit more if you want to add to it. The bio just reads, Marketing Specialist at WP Bakery. So, given that that took considerably less time than everybody else's, do you want to add anything to that?

Ivana Cirkovic It's okay for now and we can elaborate later through the stories, but yeah, I'm someone who's been working in marketing for 18 plus years. And for the last two years with WP Bakery, helping them turn their business stories into messages and stories that relate to their audiences. So, yeah, happy to be here. I'm just beginning because I've never had a product before. I've always had, you know, like building websites and things like that. And now I've got this SaaS platform, which I'll...

Ivana Cirkovic I'll just promote in a minute. It just suddenly occurs to me that, oh, that's why you need somebody like that, is it? Okay.

Ivana Cirkovic Yes, exactly.

Ivana Cirkovic Stories. Okay, we need stories. I genuinely didn't quite understand it. Not that I didn't understand it, I just couldn't, you know, I couldn't leap in my own head to why those were quite as necessary and now I totally get it.

Nathan Wrigley Now, just to say that if you want to join us on this show, we would love that. Typically, we have a bunch of people making comments. The best way to do that is probably to go to this page. If you go to wpbuilds.com forward slash live. There's two ways of commenting over there. YouTube comments are embedded to the right of the player on the desktop and below it on like a phone or something like that. But if you don't have a Google account or you don't wish to comment through Google's platform, then you can click the live chat button inside the video player and that'll...

Nathan Wrigley We'll create an option for you to put your name in and then we'll know who you are. So you can do it anonymously kind of in that way as well.

Nathan Wrigley It's really nice when people do comment. It keeps the show going. And no doubt, you know, if you've got something to say, the panelists would love to hear it and feedback and whatnot. So let's see if anybody has, in fact, given us a comment. Oh, we have. Yeah, there we go. So, Rhys is joining us. We're going to mention WordCamp Manchester a bit later. Rhys, so stick around for that. He says, afternoon, folks, looking forward to talking about PHP and not AI-like.

Nathan Wrigley I'm not really going to do the PHP thing. We've bundled it towards the end because it turned out to be a bit of a damp squib, didn't it? Well, it didn't. It got everybody panicked, but with a, you know, how to describe it, as luck would have it. It didn't destroy everything in the way that we all anticipated it would. And Tako, ooh, what a great panel today. Hi, Al.

Ivana Cirkovic Hi, Tako. Hi, Tako. Yeah, isn't that nice? What a nice comment that is. Steve Burge is joining us from the US. Happy Monday, WordPress people, indeed. Hi, hello, Steve. Hello, Steve. Hello, Steve. Nomad skateboarding, I'm guessing that's an icon, an emoji. Yes, it is. It is, in fact, a pink wave of a hand. So, there we go. Hello. Mark Andrew. And also, we've got WP Mark UK. So, that's Mark. I'm getting Mark Wilkinson, yellow, saying hello as well. And then Steve says, my plus. Yeah, I will mention it this week. I'm going to say its name this week. I am actually going to try it.

Nathan Wrigley I'm so bad at promoting things, Ivana. I don't know what it is. There's a British bit of me which pops up and goes, be quiet. No, it's the usual fear of business owners. They are, like, taken aback when they need to sell their own thing because of fear. Am I doing it wrong? Am I doing it too much? Do you know what it is with me? It is a bit of fear, I think. The closest word I can get is embarrassment. But it's not quite embarrassment, but it's something like that.

Nathan Wrigley Dave, maybe you can empathize with this. I don't know if you feel this a bit, but there's just something very peculiar for the part of the world in which I operate where you talk about yourself in positive terms. That's like a real taboo.

Nathan Wrigley Not for everybody, obviously. There's a lot of people who can completely get rid of that thing, but I suffer from it terribly. And so whenever things like this podcast is mentioned or this product that I've got, my immediate reaction is to sort of just brush it one side and go, ah, whatever. Dave, do you get it? Dave,

Ivana Cirkovic You must buy it. Well, marketing is not you must buy it, that is sales. Marketing is the importance of what you build. So, let's say your SaaS product, Nathan, you talk about it from the perspective of what it brings to your target audiences. Up until now, we didn't have a platform for podcasts the way you built it and this overall, let's say, platform that enables us to fully emerge, not just to listen to it, but to interact in a way that is easy.

Ivana Cirkovic So, you can clip that and use it. That's literally a trillion times better than I would have done. You can write down the notes.

Ivana Cirkovic I've recorded it. Yes, he's going to play it back later.

Nathan Wrigley Play that back. That's so inspiring, thank you. So Steve, forgive me, I am going to try this week. I am going to get my head out of that sandpit. And I am going to try promoting things a little bit, so you'll see that in a moment. Right, back to the comments. But Ivana, thank you. That made me feel much, much better. Hey everyone, here on time this week. We are on time, yeah. Welcome to the show, Ivana. So is Marcus. Yes, Marcus, that's right. Hello everyone is recovering from... Yes, so WebD.

Nathan Wrigley So I'm guessing this is Oli. I'm not sure if it's Oli. This is Oli from WebD, yeah. Oh yeah, it says it at the end.

Nathan Wrigley It's been a long week. It's been a long week. That's right. But I did guess it was Oli, so that's quite a good. Marcus, so happy to see the rest of you as always. Courtney's here. Hello, mug of coffee. And then finally Tako for now. out. Thank you. Ivana's bio is way too short, but just tell people to check out all the talks she did at WordCamps around the world. Yay! You can send it. Yeah, I'll send it. Or the other way around. She can send me an invoice. And then Nomad Skateboarding. I've always just been inclined to shine light on others more than myself. Can definitely relate, Nathan. Thank you. Yeah, that's great. Okay, with that in mind, okay, here it comes. Brace yourself, Nathan.

Nathan Wrigley It's gonna be okay. This bit I do every week. So this is a piece of cake. So this is WP Builds. This is the website that we have. If you want to keep in touch with what we do, we put our newsletter every couple of weeks. Just put your email address into that field and we'll send you an email. One is when this show is put out, which will be tomorrow morning.

Nathan Wrigley We'll put it out as a podcast episode, so you'll get that. Along with a great long list of news articles, many of which we're going to feature, but probably there's double the amount that we're going to touch on today. Stuff that's happened in the WordPress space, so you'll get that. The other thing that you'll get is a notification about when the latest episode of our podcast comes out. So the most recent one was all about Uncanny Automator. We had the developer of Uncanny Automator on, so we chatted about that, which was quite nice.

Nathan Wrigley So, next bit of promotional stuff is that our Black Friday page has come around again. If you are in the WordPress space and you fancy looking for WordPress deals, I think there's about, I don't know, like 75 or something like that. What's the number? 72, there you go. 72 people have put their deals on there. It's totally free, by the way, if you want to list your deal. You just click this Add a Deal button and there's a form. You fill it out and, you know, you can come on here, but you can search and filter for all the different bits and pieces. And it's got this.

Nathan Wrigley The dates when they're running from and to and the coupon code and the discount number and all that kind of stuff. And if you want to, you can advertise on this page and go like this Pride of Place spot at the top. The top three ones have already gone. That one is a work in progress. Somebody contacted me this morning and they've taken that one. So there's these four if you fancy getting on there and having your product featured a little bit more heavily, then click the little Get Started button there.

Nathan Wrigley Okay, right. Now, deep intake of breath. Right, here we go.

Nathan Wrigley I have a sass. It's called show.fm. I've been building it. I should say I've been persuading somebody to build it for me called Dan Maybe. I don't know if you've come across Dan in the UK. We built a sass to help podcasters do all their podcasty bits and pieces. And now there's probably about 30, 40, 50 people have been through it, something like that on this show.

Nathan Wrigley So far, I think it's been working absolutely fine. But basically, the whole premise of it is if you've got a podcast or you've got clients that run a podcast, we do pretty much everything apart from the recording. So the recording and editing, you're going to do somewhere else, but pretty much everything else to do with your podcast will handle for you. So as an example, you can't see it, but the guests on this show have been able to log in over the weekend and chat inside of the show notes and kind of been able to see what's going on.

Nathan Wrigley It's kind of interesting watching people chat in the show notes. That's kind of a nice little feature, but we do automation, send out emails, guest reminders. There's a whole guest network. We publish it, do hosting, do analytics. There's an MCP layer if you fancy getting your AI involved with it. So, yeah. And we've got a deal running at the moment until the 31st of October. So there's about five days left. And if you sign up, you'll get 75% off our founders deal, which is three years.

Michelle Frechette of our plan. So anyway, there you go. That's my best attempt, which felt a little bit dreadful, but anyway, there you go. I have a show hosted with you, which is not, we don't even have the website built yet, but we've got four, I think four episodes out. And I can say that it works incredibly well and actually has more features than I anticipated and made things incredibly easy for me. There's a lot of features coming. One of the most curious bits, Michelle, is as time goes by and you get more episodes under your belt, if you connect an AI agent, and by the way, we don't do much AI, but I just think given that we're on a live show, this is kind of easy to parse, you'll be able to ask questions of your podcast.

Nathan Wrigley So, for example, you'll be able to say things like, which shows were popular and who was on them? And we'll know who was on them. And we'll be able to do things like, because we've got all the analytics and we've got the transcript and we know who spoke and when they spoke and what they said, we'll be able to answer the question, which topics are popular? What things should I repeat again? Who should I have back on to talk about this particular thing? And it's really interesting when all that stuff starts to come out.