[00:00:00.00] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.11] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.25] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.28] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.29] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast, where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And thank you so much for joining us.

[00:00:24.12] - Taylor
Thank you.

[00:00:25.19] - Gordon
We had last week our recorded episode from when we were in Basel at the WordCamp Europe 2025. I had to make sure I got the title correct there. And we wanted to release it when we were actually in Basel, but the days were so busy and the internet was just not great at the times when we were able to upload it, that it just didn't get done. So we held it over for a week, which is why it was last week's episode. And we did say in it that we would probably talk to you about what we actually ended up doing during WordCamp Europe 2025. So I think what we'll do, first of all, is we'll just go through some bits that we took away from it.

[00:01:19.23] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:20.03] - Gordon
Do you want to go first?

[00:01:21.18] - Taylor
Yeah. So I found it interesting because this was the first time that I had a WordPress product that I was part of. So I was going around wearing a branded hoodie and T-shirt for WP Extended, which is the plug-in that we are building. So it was a bit different because people would obviously come up to you and say, "what's WP Extended?" Having conversations with people who use similar plug-ins or don't use anything and are looking to use a plug-in that has lots of the features that they have the little versions of, but could consolidate into one. So it's partly selling, partly networking, and just explaining to people who we are, what we do, and how we can help people.

[00:02:12.21] - Gordon
So that was a big part of your experience because you had people coming up to you. You've been helping the community quite a bit, whether that be with Manage WP or with WP Extended. So did you have anyone come up to you and go, "oh, I know you. We've never met."

[00:02:37.13] - Taylor
I had a couple of people, and I know them from their name and the very, very, very small photo that you see on their profile picture, in comments, for example. But sometimes putting a face to it and recognising them in public is completely different. I don't know whether it's just because there's more people that have seen me and know about me just because of the different roles that I have in various communities. But yeah, sometimes it's so difficult to recognise and you're like, "oh, that's who you are. I've spoken to you quite a lot, but I just would never have guessed." But yeah, I had a couple of people who called my name and I was like, it's a difficult one because you don't want to seem rude by saying, "Who are you?" But sometimes you don't know who they are. And it's only when they introduce them... Because I end up looking blank face because I'm like, "I should know you. I do know you, but I don't know you."

[00:03:34.03] - Gordon
"But we've never met." Yeah.

[00:03:36.20] - Taylor
So yeah, trying to figure out who they are, for example. Luckily, they said, "Oh, I'm X or Y."

[00:03:45.02] - Gordon
It's quite nice, though, isn't it? To have a small group of people. I mean, I say small. There was around about 2,000 people there. If you look at some of the reports online, they say there's about 2,000 people there. But it's still a small group of people with one niche, which is in this case, WordPress. But it's quite nice to be able to walk around and be a mini known person in that area, isn't it?

[00:04:13.23] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely.

[00:04:14.24] - Gordon
It's a bit like that for me when I do magic conventions. I've been doing them for so long now that you just get stopped by either people you know and have been friends with for a long time or people who know of you, which is, again, a lovely thing. It's always It's nice to have people come up and talk to you because of who you are rather than anything else. For me, it was a slightly different experience. So I'm not known in the WordPress community, but I managed to go round and talk to a lot of the vendors, find out what it was they were doing. There was a couple of products that I really liked, one in particular, which was like an AI bot, if you like, that's been trained on WordPress.

[00:05:06.22] - Gordon
And you can... It's all in beta at the minute because it's only just been developed. But the idea is you add it onto your website and you can then say, "Create me a template blog post and fill it with Lorum Ipsum," which is the random Latin words that it uses so you can see what content is going to look like even without it being proper words. And you can just ask it to do that and it'll go away and it'll do it for you. Or you can ask it, "What does this feature in WordPress mean?" Or "I'm looking for a plug-in that does this. What do you suggest?" And it will come up with things because it's been trained on not only WordPress, but also the repository and other plug-ins and themes. And so that was quite exciting because I think that will help a lot of people who may not know where to go for help. So if you're not in a WordPress community or Facebook group and you're just doing it on your own, that's the sort of product that will help you overcome a problem that you've got quickly rather than, first of all, having to find out where you can find that information from.

[00:06:26.08] - Gordon
Because you could end up looking at videos, you could end up going to Reddit, you could do all sorts of things and still not find the answer, and all of a sudden, half a day is gone. So that was really quite exciting to me. I really like that. Another thing that I really liked was WP Umbrella, which is a plug-in, well, it's a whole system really, not just a plug-in, which allows you to upgrade your plug-ins, your themes, back up your website, to make sure that you are secure. It's got things in there for limiting logins, and there's all sorts of things that it can do for your website, but it can do it on multiple websites, so you can do it on as many websites as you like, basically. And the cost is quite reasonable. I think off top of my head, it was like $2 a site per month. So what's that? $24 a year per site to have this functionality, to be able to go into a control panel and basically manage all of the sites that you have. Now, that's going to be great if you're a host and you host lots and lots of websites, or if you are a person who has lots of websites, maybe 10 or so plus, this would be really useful for.

[00:07:52.03] - Gordon
Now, I have a system already in place, which I already use, called Infinite WP, and I bought a lifetime deal for that, but that just, I mean there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not improving. There's been no updates for many years now. Every time I go in, there's an error of some sort. There are plug-in updates every now and then, but not very often. So, it's always difficult to look at moving to something that's going to cost you money instead of using something you've already got, which won't cost you money. And you've basically got to decide whether the amount you're going to end up paying is worth that cost over what you've already got. And that's the thing I need to decide. And very nicely, the WP Umbrella team were offering a month's free usage for unlimited sites just so you could have a play and see what it's like. And I think that's a really good way to sell a Software as a Service or SaaS, as we call it.

[00:09:01.09] - Taylor
Yeah, I met Aurelio. I don't really know. He's French and his business partner is also French. But I met him back in WordCamp Porto, WordCamp, Athens. I think it was Porto was the first one I met him at. And apparently he quit his job two weeks before that WordCamp and had gone all in. And I remember having a lovely chat with him when he first... Because he had one of these stands. Lovely, lovely guy. It was very, very early. It's come a long way, changed. The UI has changed, the functionality's changed. There's been new team members. Support has been always fantastic. And yes, they've always, always been improving, and they come out with new features at least once a month, which are relatively considerably good and big features as well. The one that they just launched for Basel, WordCamp Europe 2025, was an integration with Patchstack. So Patchstack are a company that allow you to do what they call V-patching. So essentially, if there's a vulnerability in a plug-in, they will virtually patch it by basically putting in the code to fix it until the plug-in company basically release an update that fixes the plug-in.

[00:10:24.13] - Taylor
So it means that you basically get... You're always going to be secure and you don't get things like day zero exploits and things like that. Then they also are a big contributor to just security vulnerabilities. They have like bounty programmes and stuff where they will pay people who find vulnerabilities in plug-ins. They then report them to people, like developers, who can become part of the, they call MVP, the something something programme. It's basically like a bounty programme where you don't have to pay anything, but they can then report those vulnerabilities directly to you, and they have, obviously, a contact to make sure that these vulnerabilities are fixed and keep the internet safe.

[00:11:08.18] - Gordon
Yeah, and having that integration means that you are going to make sure that all the sites that you manage are secure, and that's what we always want, isn't it, really? So I really like the idea behind WP Umbrella. I've not used it myself. I know you have, but there's nothing like somebody giving up their job and going all in on a project to make sure that they do the best they can and to add to it and keep improving it and listening to what their customers say and giving good support. There's nothing like making it your one and only income source to actually spend time to make it the best it possibly can be. And there are several different services out there that do this. There's Manage WP, there's Infinite WP, and WP Umbrella, and there's others. But of the ones I've seen, I think the most professional-looking and the one that works the best is WP Umbrella. And long may they continue. Well done to them. I think it's really, really good. And they seem to know what they're doing. Marketing-wise, giving somebody a month's free trial is a really good way of getting people to look at what you do and play with it and suddenly go, "Yeah, do you know what, this is worth the money."

[00:12:31.15] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:12:31.17] - Gordon
Because if you've got 150 websites that you host, for example, you're spending $300 a month, $2 a month per site. And that is a significant amount of money. But if you want to make sure that you're getting the best, and using your time constructively and making sure it takes the least amount of time to actually manage all these sites, plus you've got customers who are paying you to do so, then maybe it's worthwhile doing. You don't necessarily have to have all the sites on there. So if you've got customers that manage the sites themselves, you don't put them on, as simple as that. Let them do it themselves if they want to go off and do their own. But yeah, well done to WP Umbrella. They really impressed me at the exhibition, the vendors area. I was very impressed with what they were doing, what they were saying. He actually took me over to a separate little table in the middle so that he could talk to me about it and show it to me without other people coming and interrupting, which I thought, again, was a really nice thing to do. So yeah, that was that.

[00:13:41.18] - Gordon
Anything else you want to say? We went to a couple of parties, didn't we?

[00:13:44.20] - Taylor
Yeah, there were a couple of product, plugin-sponsored parties that we got to go to with open bars, which was nice. You get to talk to people; nerdy people, but drunk nerdy people. It's an interesting combination because people come out of their shells if they're more introverted, which a lot of that type of people are.

[00:14:12.25] - Gordon
Well, a lot of them will work for themselves. They'll either be working for themselves or they'll be working for an agency, mainly. But I'm guessing the majority are self-employed people who have their own businesses. And so they're going to be sitting in a room, whether that be an office or a room at home, building sites, managing sites, doing all of this day in, day out with... The only communication you get is on the phone when a customer rings or when you go to a meeting. So yeah, these people all of a sudden have 2,000 people just like them. And then there's a bar that's open, and then there's music, and then there's this atmosphere that's very relaxed with people who've got so much in common with you that you can just let your guard down and just enjoy it. And it was really interesting to actually see that because we met up with a few people that we didn't already know. They were people that you...

[00:15:15.26] - Taylor
From The Admin Bar.

[00:15:16.27] - Gordon
From the Admin Bar, yes. We should mention The Admin Bar. There'll be a link to The Admin Bar in the show notes. I highly recommend you join if you've got anything to do with WordPress. They are a really really nice group of people. But they posted that, "if anyone's going to be at Basel on this day," I think it was the day before, wasn't it? "We're meeting up for drinks in the evening come join us." And we decided to go along not knowing any of these people. And I think there was about six, seven people that we met up with. And we had a great time. They were lovely people. And we hung out with them during the event, didn't we?

[00:15:55.22] - Taylor
Yeah, it's interesting because WordCamp Porto, WordCamp Europe in Porto was with Jonathan and a bunch of his team. And then there was WordCamp Athens, which was very lonely because I went by myself. But Jonathan and no one else I really knew went. Funny enough, Dan went as well, which is my business partner who I didn't know at the time, and he went by himself as well. So, we both basically walked around alone because we didn't really know anyone.

[00:16:24.03] - Gordon
Billy no mates.

[00:16:25.11] - Taylor
And then Turin was good because we had quite a few people that I knew. I knew Dan, I knew a couple of other people that I speak to regularly that went.

[00:16:33.18] - Gordon
And that was my first one as well.

[00:16:35.03] - Taylor
And then you came as well. And then, yeah, this year, it was even better. We went out to the parties, we met up with people and hung out with them during the day. We had a WhatsApp group going. So people just messaged and say what they were doing at that time. "I'm going to go to the shops, anyone want to come?" or "I'm in a lecture" or whatever it was. So there's always people around, people looking to hang out. And if you were by yourself, you could just message and say, "I'm here, is anyone around?"

[00:17:04.02] - Gordon
And I'm going to give a shout out to those people because they really made WordCamp Europe a lot of fun for me, and I think probably for you as well. So thank you to... Oh here we go. Make sure I get them all in - Shannon, Chris, Jamie.

[00:17:25.20] - Taylor
Dan.

[00:17:26.14] - Gordon
Dan, yes, of course. There were the...

[00:17:30.23] - Taylor
Cohen and Keis.

[00:17:32.14] - Gordon
Cohen and Keis. And who else have we missed? I'm sure there's someone else.

[00:17:40.10] - Taylor
The two Lithuanians.

[00:17:41.13] - Gordon
The two Lithuanian guys from WP Iron.

[00:17:44.20] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:17:45.29] - Gordon
Yeah. To be honest, I'm not even... Devidas?

[00:17:50.03] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:17:50.16] - Gordon
Davidas? And cannot remember the last name. And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure I was able to pronounce it anyway. But yeah, thank you so much to all of them who may or may not see this. But you really made WordCamp for both of us. We really enjoyed hanging out with you, finding out what you were doing, what you did in the WordPress community. And we've made some friends there, didn't we?

[00:18:18.18] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:18:19.02] - Gordon
Yeah. And hopefully we'll keep that friendship going. And who knows? We might see them next year at WordCamp, which leads me nicely on to next year.

[00:18:29.01] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:18:29.18] - Gordon
So they did announce where next year is going to be. It's somewhere I've never been.

[00:18:34.20] - Taylor
I haven't been there either.

[00:18:36.06] - Gordon
No. Okay. I'll tell you the country and Taylor can tell you the city. So we're going to Poland.

[00:18:41.16] - Taylor
We're going to Krakow.

[00:18:42.19] - Gordon
Krakow, which I've never even considered going to. It's not on my list of places to visit, but I would love to go. Now I know it's going to be somewhere that we're going to be looking at going anyway. And that's happening next June. I think it's the fourth to the sixth of June. It's something like that, isn't it?

[00:19:02.21] - Taylor
First week of June.

[00:19:03.11] - Gordon
First week of June, effectively. So if you are thinking about how to progress your WordPress knowledge or how to get better with WordPress, then I highly recommend you go along next year. And there's a lot of fun, a lot of learning, a lot of networking, and I think it will be well worth your time. We're going to go, aren't we?

[00:19:25.26] - Taylor
Yeah, and you can also have a look, see if there's any local ones to you. Wordcamp Europe is the biggest one, and it changes venue every year. But there are ones for cities. There's a WordCamp Europe, WordCamp Asia, and a WordCamp US. They are the three major flagship events every year. But you also have WordCamp and then insert your city. Most likely, there will be a local meetup. If you want to go and see what it's like, you can go along to one of them. However, it is not the same as the flagship ones. I had a friend who went to one in his local city and he was like, "Oh, I'm not sure if I'm going to come to Europe." And then he came to Europe and he was like, the Europe one he said, "Yeah, it's totally different." Because it's over three days compared to the local ones, which are usually a day or an afternoon or evening or whatever. So yeah, you can always check it out. But yeah, if you want to go to a flagship one, if you can.

[00:20:25.00] - Gordon
And I should say, if you are interested to know what WordCamp Europe is like, all of the talks were videoed and they are available on the WordPress video...

[00:20:36.28] - Taylor
Wordpress TV.

[00:20:38.03] - Gordon
Channel, WordPress TV channel, which I'll link to in the show notes again. Anything that was spoken about as a talk at WordPress Europe 2025 should be available for you to watch in its entirety. It's not quite the same as being there because when you're there, you can ask questions, you can follow up with people. A lot of the people are very friendly. In fact, one of the lecturers, one of the people who gave a talk was-

[00:21:08.08] - Taylor
Ryan.

[00:21:08.24] - Gordon
Ryan. That's it. He was very very nice as well. He was really friendly, actually. We were just sitting down chatting to him and he was doing a talk the day after, which went very well. So go look up his. He did a cookbook type talk where he has recipes to create certain things in WordPress, nothing to do with food. But yeah, go and have a look at his talk. It was very good. That's pretty much all I want to say about that.

[00:21:37.17] - Taylor
Same for me.

[00:21:38.11] - Gordon
It was a busy, busy time and we came back completely shattered. But you forget about how tired you are after a week and you just remember all of the friendships you've made, the knowledge that you've gained, the networking, the product information, and those little gems that you listen to during a talk and go, "Ahh, I had no idea you could do that." And all of a sudden, your business will get better. That's it from me.

[00:22:10.11] - Taylor
And me as well.

[00:22:11.07] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, we're on YouTube. Please like, share, and subscribe.

[00:22:16.28] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:22:21.20] - Gordon
And if you prefer to listen to us, we have our podcast version, which is the audio of this video, and that can be found on any of the normal podcast platforms. Just do a search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." We'll be back with you next Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:22:43.13] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:22:56.01] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:22:46.19] - Taylor
Bye.

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Show Notes