#218 – Luke Carbis on the Future of WordPress Plugins: AI, Ethics, and New Directory Standards

Transcript

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the future of WordPress plugins, AI, ethics, and new directory standards.

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

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

So on the podcast today we have Luke Carbis. Luke has been immersed in the WordPress world for our round 20 years with experience touching upon many strands of the ecosystem. He started his own businesses, worked in agencies as a developer and product lead, contributed to WordPress Core, helped organise WordCamps, and is now a member of the Plugin Review Team. He also co-hosts the Crossword podcast.

Recently Luke delivered a talk at WordCamp Asia titled, beyond the guidelines, it’s time to evolve our standards for a safer plugin ecosystem. And today he’s here to share some of those ideas with us.

We start by talking about how WordPress.org’s plugin directory is facing a wave of new submissions driven largely by the rise of AI generated plugins. This has made it harder, both for quality plugins to stand out, and for users to find what they need, despite backend improvements and shorter review wait times.

Luke discusses how the current discovery and ranking systems can be games, how active installs play a key role, and why there’s room for improvement in surfacing the best plugins.

We also get into Luke’s suggestions for making the plugin ecosystem better, including ways to connect wordpress.org accounts with sites, streamlining discoverability and installation of both custom and premium plugins, and the idea of officially supporting a commercial plugin marketplace with proceeds potentially supporting Core contributors and community events.

A thread throughout this conversation, is how WordPress should respond to AI, not just as a technology, but as an agent of change in the community. We look at the ethical implications, generational divides in attitude towards AI, and the importance of strong leadership as WordPress faces a period of challenge and uncertainty.

If you’re interested in the future of the WordPress plugin directory, the role of commercial offerings, and how AI is reshaping open source communities, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Luke Carbis.

I am joined on the podcast by Luke Carbis. Hello, Luke.

[00:03:38] Luke Carbis: Hey Nathan, how are you doing? I heard you had a great time in India.

[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: I had a great time in India. I think you had a great time in India as well. Is that true?

[00:03:46] Luke Carbis: Yes, I love India. There’s just something really special about it.

[00:03:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. I came away with an enormously favourable opinion of my time in India. I kind of wish that that episode had not come to an end.

We are back from WordCamp Asia, which is where I spent some time with you. You did a talk, presentation, over there, and it was entitled beyond the guidelines, it’s time to evolve our standards for a safer plugin ecosystem. Let’s get into that in a minute.

Before then, can you just give us your little potted bio? I know it’s a bit of a pedestrian question, but can you just tell us a small amount about yourself, probably related to WordPress, I guess?

[00:04:25] Luke Carbis: So I’ve been using WordPress for 20 years and also, you know, roughly there. And in that time I have done everything really from like starting my own small businesses, to working for agencies in developer roles, in product roles. Worked for hosts. I’ve worked for products and plugins, and I’ve started my own plugin businesses and sold them too. And now, after contributing here and there across a variety of different teams, I’m now part of the plugin team. So I’m spending a lot of time reviewing plugins.

[00:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: So you are very much aligned with the mission of today’s episode. So I’m going to read the blurb that was included in your presentation, just to give some context to that.

[00:05:11] Luke Carbis: I’ll tell you that I give this blurb to everybody who has to introduce me before a talk, and I get varying degrees of success in terms of their ability to reproduce the words written on the page. I’m eager to hear your rendition, Nathan.

[00:05:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Here we go. I’m going to try it. I’m going to give myself one chance to get it right. It’s time to have a conversation about ethics in plugin and product design. We’ll learn that recognising and rejecting dark patterns isn’t about stricter rules, it’s about building trust through transparent, user centred design. How did I do?

[00:05:46] Luke Carbis: Oh, you did good. That wasn’t the one I was talking about actually. I thought were going to read my bio.

[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, well I’ll read your bio. Let’s move to there then.

[00:05:54] Luke Carbis: I put so much effort into that.

[00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: This I’m definitely doing as a first pass. Here we go. Luke Cabris is a self deputised open source emissary and vigilante plenipotentiary for WordPress proletariat affairs. He’s one of the hosts of Crossword, and has been a part of the community as a plugin developer, Core contributor, release lead, WordCamp organiser, and member of the plugin review team. How did I do?

[00:06:18] Luke Carbis: Amazing actually. And I think like a big part of that, you know, speaking about the silly words I’ve chosen to put in there around proletariat and so forth, that does come from a genuine place and why I got into plugin review in the first place. And maybe we’ll get into some of that in this interview.

[00:06:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, definitely. Okay, so there’s obviously an identified undercurrent of, dissatisfaction is maybe the wrong word, but you’ve clearly got some kind of estimation that things are not all going well in the plugin space. Because your talk, as I said, was talking about evolving standards for us safer plugin ecosystem. And the word safer there, I presume, implies that things could be improved.

So I guess I’m just going to ask you to lay out what it is that you believe the plugin landscape has a problem with, what’s going wrong? And then we can get into the remediation steps a bit later.

[00:07:10] Luke Carbis: Yeah, so when I was laying this out, I was thinking about, a lot about what I would do with the plugin directory if I could, if I could come in and change a bunch of things. And I realised that a lot of my bigger ideas are just not realistic.

So I would love to see maybe a plugin directory that was commercialised where plugins, you know, premium plugins could sell. But I think Matt’s been pretty clear that he’s not interested in doing anything like that, although maybe more recently had a change of heart on a bunch of things. So who knows?

I tried to stick to the basics and really, the changes that I proposed in this talk, I feel like they can get done. In fact, I can probably do them myself with a little bit of community support. And that’s the purpose of the talk.

And they’re really, mostly about this problem we’ve got with the directory at the moment where we’re just being inundated with loads and loads of new plugins. It’s becoming really hard to be able to stand out from the crowd as a product designer, and as a user, just figure out which plugin that I want to use. And of course, a lot of that is due to AI.

Nathan, we’ve seen, in the last 12 months, something like four times the amount of plugin submissions than 12 months ago. Isn’t that nuts?

[00:08:39] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess what I would say from there is, if I was to rewind the clock, I don’t know, let’s say three years, something like that, we had the same problem in that there was a deluge of things which needed to be approved from the plugin review team. A few bits and pieces were put in train, which actually appeared for a while to really get rid of that problem. You know, I think we got down to almost zero things in the queue for the plugin review team. And then coinciding almost perfectly, dovetailing into that came AI. The ubiquity of AI, the capacity of AI to create plugins and what have you. And that then presumably just turned that whole wheel back around.

And now we’re at the point where it sounds like the majority of the things which are in the queue are supposed to be AI plugins. You know, the idea that you may be able to rattle off 10 plugins in half an hour. On the face of it, that sounds like a great idea. Look, we’ve democratised plugin development and what have you.

But we have processes on wordpress.org which need to be satisfied and fulfilled so that they are measured, so that they are inspected, so that they pass the requisite number of tests and what have you. And we’re facing a problem just of numbers. There’s just numerically too many things happening all at once for the actual humans to take care of it. Does that sort of sum it up, or have I missed bits of that out?

[00:10:03] Luke Carbis: I would make a slight change to what you said actually, because the humans are actually taking care of it. We have been adding new people to the team, we have been improving our tools, and we’ve been using a bit of AI ourselves to be able to stay on top of the queue. And right now we’ve got about a week wait time before your plugin is reviewed. Now that’s always, like if you look historically, that’s a pretty good number.

Where you could be mistaken is if you look at the number of plugins waiting for review, right? You might see a lot, you might see 800, and that is much higher than it was two years ago, but we are getting through them a lot faster now.

So I think the metric to keep in mind is the wait time before review. Obviously we want to keep that at zero. Our team, we go into a critical mode. We say, oh, things are really bad if it’s two weeks. And so at the moment we’re one week, we’re pretty happy with that, trying to reduce it, of course.

The burden, there is a lot of burden on the Plugin Review team, but to me, that’s not the primary issue. The primary issue is if you create a product, if you create a plugin, then how do you stand out on the plugin directory amongst a thousand other plugins that do exactly the same thing? And if you are a user using WordPress, how do you find the right plugin for you? Or do you just give up on the plugin directory entirely and vibe code your own solution?

[00:11:30] Nathan Wrigley: Do you believe that is in fact the case? Do you think that possible submissions, the developers of, let’s say, I don’t know, countless plugins out there have just decided to do exactly that? Because they feel that, you know, they get through the week wait, the two week wait, the five day wait, whatever it is, their plugin is finally authorised, it’s on the wordpress.org repo, but then just crickets because of the way that the repo is structured, the way it surfaces things, the way it, I’m doing air quotes here, favours certain things. Is that the gripe really, that really it’s an unfair playing field? It’s sort of stacked in favour of some players as opposed to others.

[00:12:05] Luke Carbis: That’s been a long running gripe of the WordPress directory. That’s not a new gripe. That’s been around for a while. And in fact, we’ve really made some good progress towards changing up the featured plugins, for example. More the issue is the number of plugins. The number of plugins on the directory is growing just incredibly. And so it’s because of that it’s harder to stand out in the crowd.

[00:12:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the UI, I’ve always wondered how Google, for example, obviously billions of dollars spent fine tuning that algorithm. The anticipation, certainly when I’m using things like Google, is that it’s doing a credible job. But the truth is, I have no insight into whether or not it really is doing an incredible job, or whether I’m just missing out on a dozen things that would actually be superior given the search, and given the proclivities of Google to surface things based upon sponsorship or whatever it may be.

What does the wordpress.org, and again, I’m using air quotes, what does the algorithm actually do at present, to present what is on the page in the repository when I first arrive for the first time, or subsequently with search?

[00:13:15] Luke Carbis: One of the biggest differences between Google and WordPress search is that the, air quotes, algorithm is open source. And you can actually go on to GitHub now and have a look and examine exactly what it is. And it’s a whole range of things. I probably couldn’t do a good job of summarising it, but it takes into account recent reviews. It takes into account the plugin author’s ability to respond to support on the forums. And of course it takes into account keyword matching in the title and description and things like that.

There is a cutoff, if I recall, on the length of the description that is included in the search thing to prevent people keyword stuffing. And that’s something we look carefully at during plugin review. There’s a whole heap of things, of course.

[00:14:01] Nathan Wrigley: Are you satisfied that those whole heap of things that make up the search, or the display for whatever it is that you’re searching for, or the default when you first arrive at the page, do you believe that there’s room for improvement there or, yeah?

[00:14:16] Luke Carbis: Oh yeah. Have you ever used the WordPress plugin search?

[00:14:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I really have. But curiously, given my background, I’m not the best candidate for doing searches because what I’m usually searching for is the name of the thing that I’m searching for. For me, because I’ve been in the WordPress space for such a long time and frequent all these different groups and learn from other individuals at WordCamps and things, I’m usually looking for the name of a product. Or certainly searching for this very specific, tight set of words around which I know it will surface. And then I find it. And use it.

However, if I was just, let’s go for example, with one of everybody’s favourites, SEO, if I just type in SEO and hit the button, I do not know what that would give me, and whether or not it would be a credible match for what I want.

And one of the things that I would add into that is Google’s algorithm being closed source. Whilst we, as an open source community, we don’t like the idea of that. There is something slightly ungameable about it. You know, there’s a big barrier between gaming the SEO on Google which WordPress doesn’t have, because once the algorithm is open sourced, it becomes, oh look, this is what we need to do to achieve rankings and so on.

[00:15:26] Luke Carbis: And there is a lot of attempts at gaming the algorithm. But one thing it’s really, really hard to game is active installs. And that is one of the big, big ranking factors. So if you have a plugin, if your plugin has risen to the top, then, yeah, it’s going to rank better. And that kind of makes sense from my perspective.

But then again, if you know what you’re looking for and you search specifically for the exact word and it comes up second or third or tenth in the search results, because it doesn’t have very many active installs, that’s a hard problem to solve.

[00:16:02] Nathan Wrigley: So what would be some of the remediation steps? It’s a bit of blue sky thinking this, and obviously everything that is about to come out of your mouth, caveat emptor, it might not happen, or it might be an idea which, you know, upon further reflection a year from now, you think, no, that wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway. But do you have some intuitions as to what you would like to try on the .org repo? You know, experiments to run for a short period of time to see what works and what doesn’t.

[00:16:26] Luke Carbis: I do have one experiment in particular I would love to run, but I have to set it up with you, Nathan. There’s a first step and a second step.

So the first step is, I want to be able to connect my wordpress.org account with my WordPress in install. So we’ve got this new Connectors API coming in WordPress 7, where we can connect our Open AI or our Anthropic accounts with API keys or whatever it is. I’d love to be able to log in with wordpress.org. I think that would be really cool. Now, have you ever tried going into the plugins, add new, and click favourites? What happens when do that?

[00:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: I have not, no.

[00:17:05] Luke Carbis: Okay. Well, I’ll tell you. Do you think it comes up with your favourites?

[00:17:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

[00:17:11] Luke Carbis: You’ve just done it. It asks you to type in your username from wordpress.org. And that’s not a great user experience. And so if we were able to sort of connect up our wordpress.org account to our various installs, then at least we could have our favourites come up in our plugins. So that would be a step one.

And then a step two is I would love to be able to store a list of GitHub repos, doesn’t have to be GitHub, just Git, Git repos, where I have my own set of custom plugins. Or maybe even authenticated via token, premium plugins. And add that into my wordpress.org profile so that whenever I’m creating a new WordPress site, I can go plugins, add new, click on my, I don’t know, we could call it like untrusted sources, that’s what some other app stores call it. And then see a list from wordpress.org of GitHub repositories or whatever, repositories on various different systems where I can just download the zip into my WordPress site just as though I’d uploaded, you know, I’d gone, upload zip via that menu.

Why not? I think that would be a really cool experiment to run. That would allow people to run their own sort of alternative marketplaces in a sense. If they could get onto that untrusted sources list. And it also wouldn’t take away that control that wordpress.org really wants over the plugin directory, for good reasons. Because if there was an untrusted source that was nefarious or malicious, then we could just remove that from everybody’s profile also.

[00:18:50] Nathan Wrigley: So there’s a couple of things there. The first one was, it felt like something akin, now I have an Android phone. I don’t have experience with the iOS app store on a phone, but the Google Play Store I have familiarity with. And because it knows things about me from my past and the things that I’ve done in the past, it begins to have some sort of idea of, okay, here’s the kind of things that you like.

Now I’m not suggesting anything quite like that, but it feels as if there’s a step slightly towards that. In other words, given that your 10 sites that you’ve connected to wordpress.org, they all seem to have an SEO plugin in them, they’ve all got a forms plugin, they’ve all got some sort of caching solution. Those kind of heuristics might then say, okay, we know that you like those kind of things, here’s a bunch of stuff that’s around that. Did I get that right or have I sort of overstated what you were thinking?

[00:19:42] Luke Carbis: Yeah. No, that’s good. And incidentally, it’s also the first sort of required step if we were to ever go ahead and make the wordpress.org plugin directory commercial, and allow plugins to sell, or sell subscriptions. That login with WordPress would be a necessary step.

[00:20:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And the next thing that you mentioned then was kind of like this idea of untrusted sources, or at least the capacity for you to say, I trust these things. And obviously, you know, we don’t want it to be that everybody ought to trust these things, so there needs to be a sort of volunteering in, or some sort of connection which you approve or something.

How many people are these days going out to places like GitHub? I’m imagining newbies to WordPress, probably no. But I’m imagining experienced people in WordPress, developers and what have you are certainly doing that. You know, they’re finding plugins over on GitHub and downloading them and doing all of that unnecessary work.

That is an interesting idea, isn’t it? Being able to bind it so that essentially it appears in the UI, you click a button, it just does all the things that you need to do. Yeah, that’s really interesting as well. And Git, you know, ubiquitously Git.

[00:20:48] Luke Carbis: Yes. And it’s not just other people’s plugins that people are trying to access. It’s a lot of your own plugins. And talking to plugin developers, talking to people submitting their plugins to the directory, a lot of the time people would be actually just happy if they could easily install their own plugins on their various websites and on their clients’ websites. That’s a part of them pushing it into wordpress.org, into the plugin repo is just to have it there accessible. They don’t really expect a lot of users. They’re not really going for some big product launch. They just want it there and available for when they build their website.

[00:21:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And then let’s move on to what I think was the third of your points there, which was the more commercial side of things. The idea of putting premium plugins, let’s call them that. Essentially a plugin where there’s a fee in exchange for getting access to that code base.

Do you think that breaks some kind of promise that the community over 20 years has opted into? I suppose the argument from the more open source side, if you like, let’s call it that, would be that it’s going to, in its train, bring all sorts of unexpected consequences. You know, the pressure to, I don’t know, raise a 3% fee for wordpress.org, which people would say, okay, where’s that going to? You know, on the Apple iOS store and on the Google Play Store. I think it’s around 30%. But, you know, I was just taking Stripe as an example. Something like a 3% fee, but it could be anywhere, right?

And then of course you get into the whole argument of, okay, if there’s a fee attached to that and somebody’s getting paid for that, is there going to be a commercial pressure to promote only the ones where the fee is the highest, or the percentage that’s been agreed for that thing is the highest? You can see how it gets muddy basically fairly quickly.

[00:22:32] Luke Carbis: Yeah. It does get muddy and it does get messy, and I think it’s a necessary evil. Now, let me just start by saying I’m not really proposing this because the first step towards anything like this happening would be that wordpress.org must be transferred to the Foundation. That would have to be the first step.

And then the second step is, yeah, you’d have to charge developers a fee. I think actually 8% would be the right amount, okay? So we have 3% for payment processing and then Five for the Future. That’s always been the thing, right? So let’s stick with that. So let’s stick with 5% goes to the Foundation.

And what happens with that money? Well, we’ve got a problem in WordPress, don’t we? We have this problem that people aren’t contributing enough, and people don’t pay their due. And some of that is big plugins.

So what if we just put that into the foundation and use it to pay for WordCamps. Use it to pay for contributors. Use it to pay for the plugin review team. I’m not complaining. I’m a full-time sponsored contributor. But not all of the plugin review team are. So maybe use it to pay for some of those volunteer hours. I think that could be a really useful and helpful thing, especially if the Foundation has proper governance and proper oversight.

[00:23:53] Nathan Wrigley: I have literally no idea what the WordPress plugin ecosystem is, and again, I’m doing air quotes, worth. And so what I’m meaning by that is, I don’t know how many dollars move around on planet Earth each year in order to get access to pro plugins. I’m imagining it’s not a tiny amount.

[00:24:15] Luke Carbis: Not as much as WordPress hosting, but probably a lot more than people think.

[00:24:20] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Because we are in a, an ecosystem now where $97 per annum for this thing, and $47 for this thing, or $399 for this other thing. These are not numbers which kind of shock anybody. And 8% of $399 a thousand times over, a million times over adds up to quite a lot.

And so, again, I have no back of the napkin calculation there, but it does seem that that would be quite a considerable amount of money. The way that you’ve channelled it there, maybe that would be enough to satisfy people who don’t want there to be any commercial pressure inside of wordpress.org. I don’t know if you’ve had conversations with people who have a very different opinion, you know, you’re polls apart on this, and whether or not you’ve managed to persuade them with that argument or not.

[00:25:07] Luke Carbis: Yeah, look, Matt Mullenweg himself is polls apart from me on this last time I checked, and that’s okay. I get that perspective too. Introducing money into WordPress will have some big effect on the project. Maybe it’s the shock the project needs. But I personally am a fan of an expanding ecosystem. I love the idea that someone can make a living off WordPress. That’s what I’ve done for my whole career.

And if this goes another step towards enabling that for people, especially in the current climate where a lot of plugin authors and product companies and WordPress are experiencing a downward trends in terms of sales and conversions, then I think this could be a good sort of step in the right direction. Most importantly, it would give the confidence back into the market.

So I’ve been sitting, actually, Nathan, I’ve been sitting on a plugin that I probably would launch commercially as well. I’ve had it ready to go for 12 months or more with a friend of mine. We’ve launched successful plugins before. And we just haven’t launched it because we feel the timing isn’t right. We feel the WordPress plugin, the ecosystem isn’t an exciting place to be. People aren’t really interested in new products in this space, especially if it has nothing to do with AI. It feels like there’s a lack of momentum, a lack of movement in the WordPress product space, especially when it comes to the new launches, right? The last big launch I can think of was Event Koi. Maybe you’re more in touch than I am.

[00:26:45] Nathan Wrigley: No, that was a big moment for me as well, that did garner a lot of interest, yeah.

[00:26:50] Luke Carbis: And it seems like there’s a general sort of crickets when it comes to product launches in WordPress. Maybe this could be something to generate a bit more excitement again.

[00:27:00] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t quite know if it’s fatigue or what have you, but there’s definitely been a sort of slowing down of, maybe it’s because of, I don’t know, maybe people just more broadly are not kind of quite so into Facebook groups in the way that they were before, or maybe they’ve been used to unsubscribing.

[00:27:17] Luke Carbis: Could be AI. Could be a ton of different things.

[00:27:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think all of those pieces play into it. But I do think you’re right. I think WordPress has got a bit of a fight on its hands in the future, trying to maintain its interest in what, for the younger generation coming up, will probably be a bit of an AI first world.

I would imagine for developers, the idea of being able to gain revenue directly at the source, and being able to be discovered directly at the source is quite an appealing thing. You don’t necessarily have to have the most incredible website. You don’t have to have an incredible marketing team to be discovered out in Google if you’ve got fighting chance to be discovered inside the repo, which is serving up the plugins to everybody. I imagine that’s quite an exciting prospect.

[00:28:05] Luke Carbis: Oh yeah. When was the last time, if you had to install an app for your phone, you went to a website? I don’t know what it’s like on Android.

[00:28:10] Nathan Wrigley: Not ever.

[00:28:11] Luke Carbis: No, you find it on the App Store. And not only that, but also if we did something like this, we’d have built into WordPress ways for developers to update their plugin. Right now, premium plugins have to ship their own updater, even though WordPress comes with one, right? Ways for WordPress to be able to handle a licence, or maybe not a licence key, but validate a purchase, right?

Right now, every premium plugin has to do that validation step. Where did you get the plugin from? Do you have a valid purchase? So it makes a world of difference for product teams when they don’t have to distribute, when they don’t have to do quite as much marketing. And discoverability is much easier when they don’t have to worry about how they’re going to handle updates.

Even just thinking through something like, am I going to have a premium plugin and a separate, a free plugin, or am I going to have a system where I have the free plugin and then my pro plugin extends that with actions, and so we have to have both active at the same time. Or am I just going to ship premium only and not have any free, and then I’m not discoverable on the directory anymore.

Like all of that it’s sort of solved in one step. It just makes launching a product for WordPress so much easier. But I just, I’m sitting here talking about how good it is, but I just don’t actually think it’s a realistic prospect.

[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because I suppose what I’m imagining as you’re saying these words, all of it, the wall that you are constructing, all of the bricks that you are laying out kind of makes sense. It all adds up. It seems completely credible. But then in the back of my mind, I’m kind of imagining there’s quite a lot of people shouting at their podcast player at the moment. Luke, no. This is pure, you know, this is the antithesis of what we want in an open source project. Money should never be bound to it. It should be free at the point of use. And you can see how all of that goes.

And those people, their message is clear. Their message is powerful. They’re very persuasive. They’ve equally got their wall that they’ve constructed, which is probably just as persuasive. I don’t know how you get these two sides to meet, because there’s no middle ground, right? You can’t have half of a paid for plugin ecosystem. Maybe you could, but that seems like destined to fail. It’s a bit of binary, isn’t it? It’s either, yep, we’re going to do it, or no, we’re not. And I can see that bifurcating the community in the way that almost nothing has in the past.

[00:30:38] Luke Carbis: Nathan, I’ve been reflecting on Matt’s, let’s say, reintroduction back into the project. After WordCamp Asia, he suddenly has become super active, as I’m sure you saw on Slack, and he’s writing all of these like paragraphs and paragraphs of like to do items, and change this and update that. And not always in that careful, accessible language that we’ve cultivated on the WordPress project.

But it’s been very clear. This is not good enough, this is what I want to have changed. And at first when I saw this, my reaction was frustration and even a little bit of anger. I don’t agree with your opinion. And after giving it a bit of time, what I’ve begun to realise is WordPress, I think it’s safe to say that WordPress has seen a little peril in the last little while, right?

We’ve been coasting along, but there’s no guarantee that we are going to remain relevant in the discussion of, what am I going to use to create my new website, a few years from now? In fact, the answer to that question, it very well may not include WordPress, a few years from now. That is a realistic possibility. Something needs to change. And the only thing that can cause us, that can pull us unstuck from where we are right now is a strong leader, who has a strong direction.

Now, that leader might take us in the wrong direction. That leader might come in with a strong opinion and we might just go off the deep end and the whole thing might just come crashing around down by our feet.

But also, if we don’t do anything, I think that’s just as likely to end up in tears. On reflection, I’ve decided mentally to recast Matt in my mind from being this Elon Muskian figure, to being someone more akin to Steve Jobs, or DHH, or these figures that are known to be a little rough around the edges, you could say, but also visionary in terms of their product thinking.

And so that’s the change in mindset that I’m intentionally taking now into the project, to keep me sort of a bit more motivated and to reframe just like the direction. What do we need as a project? And that’s what I think we need. We need clear, direct, active leadership.

[00:33:14] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious because the more recent past has seen an absolutely logarithmic growth in WordPress. I don’t mean in the last year or two, but let’s go over the last 15 years or something like that. And particularly over the last, let’s say eight years or something like that, it’s just grown and grown and grown. And I think it’s fair to say, maybe exactly as you characterised it, we have rested on our laurels.

And I think we could point the finger largely at AI, not entirely at AI. There’s a whole load of other things, history, politics, what have you, inside the WordPress space, which will have contributed. But there is definitely this inflexion point at the moment where a lot of people, I think, are questioning what is it that I need? What are the tools that I need to build a website? And so, like you said, there is this moment where there’s a precipice and that precipice seems to be getting a little bit closer.

And it has been curious watching Matt’s reaction. I’m just reading the same things that you’ve been reading. The appetite that has been displayed there, and the expression of, you kind of need somebody to take the helm, and we need to make decisions. And it was all born out of this frustration at something, which on the face of it really ought never to have happened. You know, this capacity to commit a certain thing, which was not able to be committed because.

[00:34:32] Luke Carbis: You talking about a Akismet?

[00:34:34] Nathan Wrigley: Well, yeah, a whole committee needed to decide on whether this, that or the other thing. Again, it’ll be really interesting, in the way that we discussed earlier about the plugin repo becoming commercial. It’ll be interesting to see how the community reacts to that.

I don’t know if you’ve got a, obviously you are leaning into that and thinking, okay, better to have a dictator that’s got a direction than just slowly withering away, the community dying over time and the project failing. It’ll be interesting see if everybody has that same reaction, or whether people regard that as something that they can’t tolerate. And whether or not indeed that itself will haemorrhage the community, you know, create another fork in the road if you like.

[00:35:14] Luke Carbis: Let’s talk about that. Like, let’s talk about, is the direction, we agree I think that we need a direction, right? We need clear, strong leadership. What about the direction though? How do you feel about this focus in on AI? I’ll give you a hint. For me, it’s hard to bet against AI, but the core, if you had to boil WordPress’ sort of spirit down to three words, for me, those words would be, code is poetry. And I don’t see that reflected in the AI focus. What do you think?

[00:35:51] Nathan Wrigley: My supposition is that when I got into any of the open source projects that I was ever into, there was this philanthropic bit of me which definitely got engaged by that. And so I loved that. I loved the kind of community side. I think it’s part of me as a human being. I’ve often, rebelled is too strong a word, but I’ve always managed to find my way away from situations where there was somebody telling me what to do. I’ve always enjoyed that capacity to do things on your own, or at least as a community to decide how things are going to be.

However, the world really doesn’t seem to work in that way. You know, the world that we occupy is led by companies which have a strong direction. Governments which have a strong intuition on what their citizens want, and so on and so forth.

And so I’m kind of drawn into the argument that you’ve just made. I think it’s worth a punt. I do not know what AI is going to do to our community. It may be that AI is going to upend everything so severely and so dramatically that no retrofitting of a CMS will be capable of stopping the inexorable rise of it, and we’ll all be using AI for everything from now on.

But it does feel like the framework has been built to allow AI to be an integral part of a CMS, which people are familiar with and willing to use over and over again in the decades to come.

But in terms of the leadership thing, I think it’s worth a punt. We know how in open source there can be atrophy. Things can just feel like you’re walking through molasses because the committee hasn’t decided the thing, and what have you.

That’s been okay. The history of WordPress demonstrates that that has actually worked. We’ve been able to get through it in that manner. But I’m not sure that facing a fairly, apocalyptic is the wrong word, let’s go with seismic, a seismic thing like AI, we’re up against a bit of a different animal now. And maybe we need to adapt our strategy.

And maybe it’s a temporary thing, you know, maybe that’s a way of dealing with it. I think, I could be wrong, memory could prove me wrong here. I’m pretty sure that in Matt’s Slack commentary that you’ve been referring to, I think it was a, it was a period of time, wasn’t, it? Wasn’t the proposal that I, you know, give me the reigns for a year, or something along those lines. I can’t remember. If I’m misrepresenting that, I’m sorry. But maybe it’s worth a punt. It certainly sounds like it’s convinced you anyway.

[00:38:15] Luke Carbis: Yeah. And then when we come to like AI strategy, there’s really two different aspects of that, right? We’ve got, how is AI integrated into WordPress? And I’ve been actually really, really happy with the direction that like the AI plugin has been going in. Because it’s all built around this principle of it being an add-on, being optional, I don’t have to use AI in my WordPress if I don’t want.

What worries me more is that there seems to be a real push from Matt and project leadership to be using more AI in our contributions, right? Using AI to create new pages on wordpress.org, using AI to create new plugins, right? Using AI to create pull requests and various other things.

And so that part I’m a little bit more cautious about. And I’m especially cautious from the perspective of like the generational change that WordPress needs right now. We need more young people involved in the project. And every time I speak to someone from Gen Z, they are not interested in using any kind of AI whatsoever. I don’t know if you’ve noticed the same. But Gen Z seems to have this huge anti AI thing about them.

I’m worried about pushing those people away, and also just anybody else who doesn’t want to use AI. So I do use AI, right? I use AI a lot. But there are real ethical concerns when it comes to AI. And to me, WordPress has always been this really welcoming, open, considerate, accessible community.

I can go to a WordCamp and get a kosher meal. That’s pretty special. You can go to a WordCamp and you can get the audio translated into your language on your phone from the talk that you’re going to. All of these like accessibility concerns have always been forefront. And I feel like if I want to opt out of AI, I don’t have that option if I also want to be a WordPress contributor.

[00:40:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I think the words to some, well, singular word to sum up my relationship with AI is confusion. I’m really conflicted by it because I can see the productivity gains on the one hand, and then on the other hand, I can see how potentially dehumanising it could be. And I slightly worry that we’re going to paint ourselves into a future in which the dehumanising wins out. And that concerns me.

I suppose the best analogy, and I’m just coming up with this on the fly, is it feels as if the aliens just landed and they’re now amongst us and there’s millions of them. And they’re just on our high street, and they’re walking around, and they’re in the supermarket, and there they all are.

And last year they weren’t there and life was just a bunch of humans and the animals that, you know, evolved on Earth. And suddenly we’re trying to figure out, okay, what do we do with these characters who are now part of our lives? But they’re way quicker than us at a million tasks, and they’re way faster than us, and way more productive than us. But also they are not us. Confusion is what I’ve got.

[00:41:19] Luke Carbis: I don’t think you’re alone. I think that’s a common feeling. The question I keep asking myself, keep coming back to is, are my children going to thank me for my AI contributions? Am I going to be like how I think of the, I don’t know, baby boomers? I look at the baby boomers and think, I’m a millennial, right? So I look at the baby boomers and think, oh, look, you wrecked the world with your corporate greed and pollution. Are our kids going to look at us the same way? Oh, you wrecked the world with your AI.

[00:41:49] Nathan Wrigley: That is definitely an outcome which has a non-zero chance of being true. And curiously, I have multiple children, to my knowledge, none of them use AI in any way, shape, or form. Now, that definitely maps to the kind of things that they’re interested in, but I do worry sometimes that the tech bubble that I’m in leads me to have this conception that AI will actually eat everything.

Whereas, AI is not going to get me to the swimming pool. It’s not going to get me to enjoy the view off the mountain nearby anymore than I enjoy already. You know, all these million things that it simply can’t do. But because I’m dwelling in a community which obsesses about it, and seems to portray the future as AI or broke, maybe I think about it too hard and maybe the breaks will come on because the next generation just won’t allow it, as you’ve described.

[00:42:42] Luke Carbis: I kind of hope so. Is that bad to say that? I don’t know. I enjoy using AI.

[00:42:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you end up where you are. You haven’t gone anywhere new. So it’d be, I suppose it’d be a bit like having an iPhone four forever. Is that bad? No, because everybody’s got an iPhone four forever.

[00:42:59] Luke Carbis: We just end up somewhere different though. We wouldn’t end up in the same place.

Can I tell you an anecdote which really sort of informs a lot of my thinking around this? I was in a classroom, it was a media arts classroom of 15 year olds. And we were talking about referencing. And I suggested to these 15-year-old students, why don’t you just send ChatGPT all of your sources and get it to output everything in Harvard style so then you don’t have to do anything. Just paste that into your reference list.

And a full half of the class stood up out of their seats and said, no sir, we do not use AI. That is bad for the environment. We’re going to get dumb if we use it. We refuse. I was shocked. And it was such a strong response.

Now that’s an anecdote, right? Might not be universal, although the Verge published this article just recently talking about how such a high percentage of Gen Z feel really terrible about the direction that AI is going in. So that’s, I think it’s worth consideration. And I’m not saying let’s not use AI in the project. All I’m saying is I think we need to hedge a little bit more than we are.

[00:44:14] Nathan Wrigley: What an interesting conversation. We started out with plugins and the plugin repository, and then we’ve smuggled in the conversation of our time, AI.

[00:44:22] Luke Carbis: I can bring it all together for you. Let’s bookend it. One of the suggestions in my talk is I would love to see, and I’d love to get your feedback on, and listener feedback on AI disclosure, an AI disclosure on the plugin repo.

So if you create a plugin, you can voluntarily opt in without anybody telling you that you’re lying or whatever. Let the market sort out whether people are going to try to game it or not, without any validation. You can just specify in your plugin headers that you used a certain level of AI. And it’s not AI, or no AI, because there’s a whole range, right? Might just use AI just for idea generation or auto complete. Or I might use AI somewhere in between. I might use AI just to vibe code the whole thing and never even look at the code.

So I’ve defined these five sort of different levels. They align with more like academic literature around AI disclosure. And I’m suggesting that what we do is we provide just a simple plugin header for people to be able to specify their level of AI use in their plugin, and have that surfaced on the plugin directory, alongside user reviews and last time you updated the plugin and things like that, just as a little bit of extra metadata.

It would do a couple of things. One is it would let us gather some data, first of all, about how many plugins use AI and how well they do. Maybe we find that plugins that use AI get frequent updates, and high reviews. And maybe we find the opposite. But we don’t have any way of knowing right now. We have no way of telling whether a plugin is using AI or not. So that’s the proposal.

[00:46:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, it’s a really interesting idea because I know that in the podcasting space, which I’m familiar with as well as WordPress, that we have these 2.0 tags and one of them is this sort of declaration of whether or not AI has been used. But it’s not a sliding scale, it’s just sort of binary. I think there’s three choices. Yes, some, and the whole thing, or something along those lines. So it’d be interesting to see.

I think that’s a really credible idea. I suppose my only concern is, in much the same way that when I visited the person on the corner of my street who sells eggs on the street and there’s an honesty box, and we go and buy the eggs and we pop the money into the little honesty box. I am well aware that most of those eggs go missing. Nobody puts money into the honesty box. It’ll be interesting to see how that in itself would get gamed. In other words, if the intuition was, okay, people now love the declaration of, there’s no AI.

Let’s imagine a scenario where that turns out to be the popular thing, it would be an honesty box decision, wouldn’t it? Okay, I definitely built my entire plugin entirely with AI, but it’s going to promote much more effectively if I say that there was no AI used with that. You can see how the human in the loop is the weakest link there.

Okay, I think we’ll knock it on the head. Luke, what an absolutely fascinating and broad ranging discussion. Just before we go away, do you want to tell us a little bit about what it is that you do with your Crossword podcast just so that we can maybe get some earbuds listening to that as well?

[00:47:31] Luke Carbis: Yeah, absolutely. Jonathan Wold and I have been recording Crossword. It’s a WordPress podcast. We’ve been going for years and years, over a hundred episodes. We’re into season 11 now of Crossword, and love it if you would join us there and subscribe in wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:47:50] Nathan Wrigley: What’s the URL for the website?

[00:47:51] Luke Carbis: You can find us at crossword.fm.

[00:47:54] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. Well, Luke, what a fascinating discussion. I really appreciate it.

Dear listener, we’ve been battling with the hail in Australia. We must have pressed pause a dozen times, and Luke’s had to repeat sentences over and over again. By the time this goes out, I’ll maybe have edited all of that away, but I appreciate your sticking power in what has proved to be a fairly fraught recording process. Thank you, Luke, for chatting to me today.

[00:48:17] Luke Carbis: Thank you, Nathan. See you later.

On the podcast today we have Luke Carbis.

Luke has been immersed in the WordPress world for around 20 years, with experience touching upon many strands of the ecosystem. He’s started his own businesses, worked in agencies as a developer and product lead, contributed to WordPress Core, helped organise WordCamps, and is now a member of the plugin review team. He also co-hosts the Crossword podcast.

Recently, Luke delivered a talk at WordCamp Asia titled ‘Beyond the Guidelines: It’s Time to Evolve Our Standards for a Safer Plugin Ecosystem’ and today he’s here to share some of those ideas with us.

We start by talking about how WordPress.org’s plugin directory is facing a wave of new submissions, driven largely by the rise of AI-generated plugins. This has made it harder both for quality plugins to stand out and for users to find what they need, despite backend improvements and shorter review wait times. Luke discusses how the current discovery and ranking systems can be gamed, how active installs play a key role, and why there’s room for improvement in surfacing the best plugins.

We also get into Luke’s suggestions for making the plugin ecosystem better, including ways to connect WordPress.org accounts with sites, streamlining discoverability and installation of both custom and premium plugins, and the idea of officially supporting a commercial plugin marketplace, with proceeds potentially supporting core contributors and community events.

A thread throughout this conversation is how WordPress should respond to AI, not just as a technology but as an agent of change in the community. We look at the ethical implications, generational divides in attitude towards AI, and the importance of strong leadership as WordPress faces a period of challenge and uncertainty.

If you’re interested in the future of the WordPress plugin directory, the role of commercial offerings, and how AI is reshaping open source communities, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Crossword podcast

Introducing the Connectors API in WordPress 7.0

Event Koi plugin