Tips Tuesday – FAIR Project, New Blocks, Direct Sales with Video 

Tips this week include:

• WordCamp US Summary
• FAIR Project leaders elected
• My concerns about the FAIR project
• Phased plugin rollout proposal
• Proposal for new blocks
• Why themes are not as adaptable to WP core changes
• Making direct sales from video
• Why I delayed Short video releases
• Why I decided not to make money with music
• Trick to add comments to scheduled Reels
• Multiple changes at Cloudflare
• Claude code used in hacker attacks
• How to opt out of Claude trainings
• AI chatbots suck

Welcome to Muesday for those who were off for the holiday weekend.

And welcome to the final third of 2025. We’re officially in the race to the finish line.

WordPress Tips

WordCamp US Summary

WordCamp US was held this past weekend in Portland, Oregon. 

Last year, at this same location and event is where Matt Mullenweg dropped his WPEngine meltdown bombs that shocked everyone and tore the WP community apart.

The lawsuits are still ongoing for what Matt claims WPEngine monetarily owes the WordPress Foundation. 

And the trademark applications are still in the courts too. Matt is trying to trademark the phrases “WordPress Hosting” and “WordPress Managed Hosting” and has so far failed in court, but an appeal will be in the works soon.

In this year’s keynote, Matt made light of it in his opening comments, and then gave the usual “State of the Word” type address of all the achievements this year in growth of the community and platform.

Whew! I’m relieved that there is no new drama and perhaps we can get through the end of the year in peace, as far as WP is concerned.

FAIR Project Leaders Elected

Y’all may also remember that last year Matt Mullenweg revealed that he owns the WordPress.org repositories. And then went on to remove access for folks who opposed his views on the WPEngine matter. 

That scared everyone, and later that year the FAIR Project was started by Joost de Valk as a non-profit entity that no single person controls.

Carrie Dils, Mika Epstein, and Ryan McCue have been serving as the interim Chairs of the FAIR Project since it began. This past week they have been officially elected to those positions.

The LINUX-backed project’s aim is to decentralize the WordPress theme and plugin repositories in order to truly democratize access to them.

My Concerns about the FAIR Project

What the FAIR Project aims to do is admirable, and I’m in agreement with it in principle. I also have full faith in the leadership. These are some of the people that I have known the longest and respected the most in the WP community.

My concerns lie with how they will implement such a thing in a way that will not disrupt the following:

• Code reviews before and after inclusion in the repos
• Security reviews of what is already in the repos
• Number of installations
• Reviews from users
• Support forums
• And my number 1 concern is how our sites will connect to these various repos to scan for updates and deliver them.

This one thing can turn into a security issue for us.

So, I’ll be keeping close watch on their progress. But I guarantee that we will not be one of the beta testers.

Phased Plugin Rollout Proposal

Sometimes a plugin update introduces a new bug. And sometimes that bug is only revealed after more site owners with radically different setups do their updates.

So, to avoid widespread breaks like that, the folks at WordPress are working on a Phased Rollout tool.

This will allow developers to limit how many sites receive the update. And if there is a bug reported, they will have the chance to fix it prior to the full release.

No matter what, we will keep using the WP Rollback plugin and method in this tutorial to revert to a previous version should we encounter a bug on a free plugin.

FYI, restoring from a backup or reinstalling things, especially WP, are risky and last-resort types of fixes. So, definitely don’t do those first!!!

Gutenberg Tips

Proposal for New Blocks

The Gutenberg Editor started out as a plugin that could be added to WordPress before it was adopted into the core during the 5.0 release.

And that plugin is where the WP team still iterates and tests changes to the Gutenberg editor.

Some of those changes get adopted into WP core during each major update.

But, there are several blocks that have long been in the plugin that have never made it into core because too many folks believe that they should remain as more advanced features in 3rd-party plugins, like Kadence Blocks.

Some of the blocks in question are:

• Icons
• Tabs
• Accordions
• Sliders
• Breadcrumbs
• Table of Contents
• Mega Menus
• Dialog pop-ups

Themes are Not as Adaptable to WP Core Changes

It wouldn’t be a huge deal for block plugins to adopt the WP core code, if that worked for them.

But, that’s not true of themes. The issue with including these new blocks in the WP core is that some themes provide these functions too. 

If you use a child theme, keep in mind that the underlying framework would update to make use of the new WP core code, but your child theme would not.

That’s not to say that your child theme would break – it likely wouldn’t. But it is to say that it will not support all of the new WP core code.

However, there is a way around this. I used the same child theme for about 4 years and asked my designer to update it to support major code changes, like when WP started supporting SEO schema markup, and then again when Gutenberg became available in core. That was cheaper than getting a whole new theme.

However, there finally came a time when I needed a new design to keep up with the trends and/or my ever-changing business focus, and I chose to start with a new base that supported all WP core changes at that time too.

So, keep these things in mind and ensure your child theme keeps current with WP when there are significant changes that warrant a code update, whether or not you want a design change.

I’ll let you know when I update my core code for such a thing.

Video Tips

Direct Sales from Video

Woot!!! Last week I made my first sale of the new Halloween line drawings PDF that I recently created.

And that sale came directly from a YouTube video!!

In fact, all sales I’ve made of that PDF have come from my YouTube videos.

This is where having a product helps you diversify your income streams.

Folks do not have to visit my site for me to make money – and I make it twice – from them viewing the video and from them buying the product.

I’ve made Amazon affiliate sales from videos too.

Why I Delayed Short Video Releases

I have often heard my clients say that they started their holiday campaigns in August.

So, I was in a huge hurry to get my Halloween videos posted this month.

While an August campaign may work on Pinterest, it falls flat on YouTube.

My metrics have been down through the summer until last week, and I’m thinking that new bump has more to do with the cold front that dropped temps across most of the country last week than with the calendar date.

So, I’ve held off releasing my Shorts until now, as they have a limited initial push.

I have enough to release at least one a week from now until the week of Halloween.

It will be interesting to watch the metrics to see if the first ones I release in September get promoted again in October, along with the new ones that I release that month.

Why I Decided Not to Make Money with Music

If you’ve been with me a while, then you know I used to compose jingles and I got airplay in 14 countries with them. But I also got ripped off a lot, and international tracking was not good back then, so I left the music business.

You may recall that last week I said I could not find a way to use a platform’s trending music on some of my videos as there were no volume controls unless I did it on the app, which I don’t like using. So I created my own Halloween music.

But, before I released any videos with that music on it, I checked into how folks get paid by the platforms when their audio tracks are used. It’s actually pretty easy to track those metrics through some low-cost distribution services now. But, there are restrictions on the types of accounts where the music can legally be used, like only on personal accounts, not business accounts. 

And that would actually make it hard for me to use my own music on my own videos because of my account types.

So, I chose not to put it up for distribution at this time, and to just put it behind my voiceovers on my own vids.

You can hear that little Halloween jingle at the start of this video, if you like.

All of the Shorts have this new music and are being published on all platforms now too.

Trick to Add Comments to Scheduled Reels

I saw a nice tip from Mari Smith about a trick you can use when scheduling posts/Reels on Facebook. You can also include a comment and it will be included when the post/Reel goes live.

I added to the new tutorial I posted about a week ago in the DIY SEO Everywhere course for a new way to post to Instagram and your Facebook business page.

This is going to save me a TON of time, as I thought I would have to schedule manually putting a link in the comments for where folks could find the full video and my PDF of line drawings.

Webmaster Tips

Multiple Changes at Cloudflare

Cloudflare is currently rolling out a bunch of new dashboards and/or overview page updates.

And there have been a few settings changes too.

And perhaps some of these changes introduced a bug with how the Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate at our host is getting denied when it attempts to renew, which happens every 90 days. (I reported that on the CF Forum.)

Last week I sent an email to my Webmaster Training members with more details about the changes.

So, if you are in that membership, or the Hub, some Cloudflare tutorials may or may not look like what you see in Cloudflare. I’ve already updated a bunch of tutorials in both memberships, but I’m waiting for these new changes to fully roll out before updating more.

Just holler at me if you need tips on how to get to settings for now.

AI Tips

Claude Code Used in Hacker Attacks

I’m surprised this took so long to happen. And it’s what scares me about AI Agents of all kinds.

Read this article from the nice folks at The Hacker News for the full story.

Here’s a clip of what scares me the most:

“Agentic AI tools are now being used to provide both technical advice and active operational support for attacks that would otherwise have required a team of operators,” Anthropic said. “This makes defense and enforcement increasingly difficult, since these tools can adapt to defensive measures, like malware detection systems, in real-time.”

This is why I recently asked Cloudflare to provide a report with details of visitors that beat the Managed Challenge rules.

Right now, you have to go through them individually to see which ones failed and which ones made it through. No way!!! We need a report of the ones that beat the challenge. These AI agents are getting smarter every day and eventually it will become AI against AI in the online security war.

Opt Out of Claude Training

I like Claude AI better than ChatGPT for helping create titles and descriptions, or just bouncing ideas around. 

I also liked that it only kept conversations for 30 days and did not use them for training the AI model. Still, I never shared sensitive or personal info with it.

Well, now they have decided to make a big change with their Terms of Service.

They will now hold conversations for 5 years and use them for training the AI.

The good news is, you can opt out of it.

How to opt out:

• Existing Users: Go to Claude Settings > Privacy Settings and turn off “Allow model training”
• New users: watch for checkmarks in the terms before you accept them. 

AI Chatbots Suck

One of the reasons that I’ll never work with a book publisher again is because sometimes they do things that are good for them and not good for you as the author, or good for the book.

The publisher of my Sage Age book refused to put a “Peak Inside” preview of a few pages on Amazon, but thought nothing of putting a full quarter of the 400 pages on Google Books.

That publisher has been out of business for a few years now and I had fits getting Google Books to take that preview down.

It took 14 touches on a support ticket, most of which was arguing with their stupid AI responses, even with them telling them repeatedly that the publisher who submitted it was out of business and all rights had been returned to me.

I finally got a person to reply when the AI triggered on the word “lawyer”.

Y’all, NEVER put one of those AI chatbots on your site, even if it is trained on your data.

It will just piss off any visitor who has to use it.

The only ones I’ve found that work well are those that automatically put you in touch with a person after the third failed attempt to address your inquiry.