[00:00:09.18] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.28] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.05] - Gordon
My name is Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.23] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.26] - 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 we are, as you can see, in a different location to where we normally are.
[00:00:28.25] - Taylor
We are.
[00:00:29.24] - Gordon
Where are we, Taylor?
[00:00:30.25] - Taylor
We are in Basel.
[00:00:32.23] - Gordon
And Basel is in Switzerland. And we are here for WordCamp 2025. Now, we don't have our normal microphone set up, so hopefully our audio is okay. We won't know till we've finished, so I hope it's all right. Let's get straight into it. We've been here now for a couple of days. The convention starts tomorrow, for real. They had contributors day today, but the actual event starts properly tomorrow. So let's first of all talk about why we're here. We spoke about it a little bit last week, and then we'll tell you what we've been doing over the last couple of days. So, Taylor, do you want to explain a little bit about WordCamp?
[00:01:21.11] - Taylor
Yes. So we are here for WordCamp, which is a conference for WordPress. It's the European conference. So they have lots of them, both big and small. There are a couple of flagship ones. So there's one In America, the WordCamp US, there is WordCamp Europe, which is kind of covers the whole of Europe. And then there's also WordCamp Asia, which are the three main flagship events. WordCamp Europe being the largest. I think last year there was about 3,000 people. There are smaller versions of them. So there's also like WordCamp Italy or like WordCamp, you know, with the name of the city. And they're kind of locally run, but WordCamp Europe is the largest one and kind of changes location every year. So last year we were in Turin in Italy. There's been, it's been in Berlin, Athens, Porto. There's been lots and lots of them. And so this year we are in Switzerland, in Basel, and we're here to meet people, meet friends, make new connections, meet the kind of sponsors, so people, kind of the vendor hall with lots of people who have stands. Speak to system developers and new products and things like that, attend talks and workshops, finding out new things that are coming up, finding out about new ways to use WordPress.
[00:02:48.07] - Taylor
And, you know, there's both things from the technical point of view and also things that are more marketing. So if you run an agency, how you can scale your kind of agency more with WordPress and how you can streamline things and yeah, just lots of fun really.
[00:03:04.14] - Gordon
And the other thing is the networking part of it, which is really important because you get to meet all sorts of people. You've got to be. You've got to. At these sort of events, I find you need to actually just sort of talk to people and just sort of maybe step outside your comfort zone. Because a lot of people don't like to talk to strangers, but they're not really strangers, they're just people in the same sort of business that you are, that you haven't met yet. And you may find out that when you talk to someone, you do actually know them or you know of them and then all of a sudden you've made a connection and you never know where that connection will take you. One of the, one of the reasons that you're here, Taylor, is because of WP Extended, isn't it? Which is what's written on your jumper here. Do you want to sort of talk a little bit about WP Extended?
[00:03:58.22] - Taylor
Yeah. So WP Extended is a plug-in for WordPress that is a kind of like a utility Swiss Army Knife plug-in that allows you to add features and functionality to your WordPress website that kind of should be in core. So things like duplicating an existing page; or being able to switch the user so you can test functionality for if you've got like an admin or an account area; the ability to set up SMTP so you can send emails correctly, all of these things that kind of should be in the native core WordPress that aren't. And yeah, just bundled into one single plug-in, so you have one source of truth to maintain. You don't have to have lots and lots of little smaller plug-ins. I think the biggest thing is that you don't have the conflicts because they're all maintained and developed by us. So we can kind of make sure that the modules and plug-ins don't conflict, which you don't get with having them all separate.
[00:05:03.23] - Gordon
Yeah, and I mean the current version is out and there's a big announcement that is happening once we get back from WordCamp. So if you are in the WordPress community or you use WordPress, then there is a free version that you can get. Just do a search for WP Extended, it's in the repository. And there's also a pro version which gives you lots of extra features and that is well worth looking into as well. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. The other guys from WP Extended are actually here.
[00:05:43.17] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:44.04] - Gordon
We've got Dan who is sort of the owner of the plug-in. He's with us, in fact he's staying in the same hotel. There's Sumit.
[00:05:54.07] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:54.20] - Gordon
Who's one of the programmers. There's yourself.
[00:05:59.00] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:59.12] - Gordon
What's your job description?
[00:06:02.06] - Taylor
I don't really know. Kind of developer slash, kind of quality assessor. I don't know, I kind of just float about basically.
[00:06:10.23] - Gordon
Have I missed anybody?
[00:06:11.29] - Taylor
I don't think so.
[00:06:12.17] - Gordon
In the team. Yeah. So they're here, and they're going to be talking to people about WP Extended. But you don't have to, you know, wait until someone comes and talks to you. You can just go and have a look for it yourself and then discover what WP Extended can do for you. So that is our next couple of days. We've got all of that to come. It's going to be quite full on days but you know, quite rewarding. I always find conventions are really tiring but then you sort of, you look back on them and you think "gosh, I did so much in that time" and that's probably why they're quite tiring. So we've got all that to come. We are currently sitting in our hotel room as you can see and we are going off to a sort of a party put on by several companies. Elementor is one of them.
[00:07:05.08] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:07:05.20] - Gordon
Malcare is another and there's someone else, I can't remember who it is. And they're putting on a sort of a party which we've been invited to so we're going to go along to that. A sort of a pre-convention sort of meetup I guess.
[00:07:19.17] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:07:19.29] - Gordon
So that's, that's where we're going next. But when you come to a place like Switzerland, and in this case Basel, that you've never been to before, we came a couple of days early. One because it suited us because of the flights and everything but also we wanted to come and make sure we actually, you know, found out a little bit about the place. [sneeze] Oh, pardon me. And we've spent the last two days sort of looking around, haven't we?
[00:07:48.06] - Taylor
We have.
[00:07:48.24] - Gordon
And we've done an awful lot. So on the day we got here we sort of arrived, we touched down about sort of half past 8 ish in the morning and you know, by the time we got to our hotel and stuff and checked in, it was about sort of 11 o' clock, because of the clocks going forward. And so we actually had quite a full day looking around Basel.
[00:08:11.15] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:08:12.28] - Gordon
And we did an awful lot. We went to a point in Basel where you can actually see sort of the rivers that meet, where you've got France on one side, Germany on the other side. And we were standing in Switzerland seeing all this, so there's a bridge, in fact, that we could see and on one side was France, the other side is Germany and we were looking at it from Switzerland. And, you know, that's just mind blowing for me because you've got three countries that all come together and, you know, obviously it makes sense when you think about Europe and you've got all these countries together and it's just seeing them all in one place. It's just, you know, it's not something that we see as UK citizens very often. What else did we do on that day?
[00:09:00.09] - Taylor
Just walked around, basically, and explored the city.
[00:09:03.17] - Gordon
Figured out where the trams go and which trams we needed to get, and making sure we knew how to get to the convention centre. Yeah, we had a great time. That was really good. And then yesterday we went to a place called Lucerne, which was about an hour and a quarters train ride away. And then when we got to Lucerne, which was lovely, by the way, really, really lovely place, they had an amazing bridge that you could walk along, which sort of was a diagonal across the river, or it wasn't a river it was a lake, wasn't it? But yeah, all made of wood, which they're renovating and restoring, which is just beautiful. And then we went along to the cable car, for the what was the name of the. Pilates? No.
[00:10:01.02] - Taylor
Mount Pilatus.
[00:10:02.09] - Gordon
Pilatus. Pilates, Pilates. I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but yeah. So we got the cable car up two levels and then got off and spent a little bit of time there. That was about 2000 metres, I think it is -ish, above sea level. We went on a sort of a high ropes thing there.
[00:10:25.20] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:10:26.06] - Gordon
Which was amazing. And knackering at the same time.
[00:10:31.18] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:10:32.16] - Gordon
Just you, you sort of. You went in, you had your safety checks, you know, so you could figure out exactly what needed to be done and how you did it. And then they just let you loose for like up to three hours. And I think we ended up doing about an hour and a half and I sat out a couple of them because, yeah, I was just so tired. But it's all the upper body strength to keep yourself up and, you know, all these high ropes and zip wires and it was just amazing. All in the treetops overlooking this huge. Between all these mountains. It was just beautiful.
[00:11:08.25] - Gordon
And in fact, on the other side from where we were, you couldn't see anything because it was cloud. The cloud was just, you know, on the other side of the building, which was just mad. And there was. There was blocks of snow and ice just sitting in, you know, bits and places because you're on the top of a mountain. And then we got another cable car that went right up to the top and that was where there was a hotel and there was, you know, more steps going up to sort of viewing points and another one that was even higher with steps that were, you know, really steep and oh, my goodness it was a bit of a workout, wasn't it?
[00:11:47.20] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:11:49.24] - Gordon
Taylor had his laptop with him for the train so he could work on the train. But we got to the top and, you know, he just took his laptop out and we took this photo of him just sitting on his laptop, which was just great, wasn't it?
[00:12:05.00] - Taylor
Yeah, it was good.
[00:12:06.11] - Gordon
But that was just beautiful. Just a lovely, lovely day. You know, we, it could have been better were the sky a bit clearer because we did have this cloud that kept moving, but it was moving at quite a pace. You could, you know, you could see a mountain opposite you and then sort of turn away and turn back and it had gone because it was all covered and it was like mist. You couldn't see through it. It was just disappeared. And they had a little train that sort of came up the mountain and it just, just fascinating. Just, you know, I don't. Because we are quite curious about these sorts of things. We were trying to figure out what sort of infrastructure they needed to be able to build a hotel and run a hotel on the top of a mountain.
[00:12:59.12] - Gordon
Because it took about 35 minutes, I think it was, to get all the way to the top by cable car. So, you know, it's a fair old way and when you're thinking about, you know, getting your normal everyday supplies up there, just, you know, food and, and water and all of your, you know, other supplies and staff and everything else that have to come up every day. They had their own cable car, especially for deliveries, which was amazing to see. And just, you know, how do you build something like that? You obviously need cranes, but you're then having to build cranes on the top of the mountain and bringing everything up and all the concrete and all the, all the iron girders and everything that's needed. It's just a huge operation, you know, I have no idea how they did it. It's the sort of thing that I'm going to look up. But that was pretty amazing as well. And I had my 360 camera, which was a bit scary at one point because as we were coming up in the cable car, I stuck it out the window so that we weren't inside a cable car and you could get the actual outside of the cable car. And that was just sort of holding on for dear life because if you let go of that it would just basically fall and that would be it gone. So that didn't happen, luckily.
[00:14:19.04] - Taylor
That's good.
[00:14:19.25] - Gordon
So touch wood, it doesn't happen from now on. And yeah, hopefully the footage, I haven't looked at it yet but hopefully the footage will be amazing for that. So, yeah, we made good use of our two days here and we've got another two days full of convention to go. So, yeah, that's pretty much all I wanted to say. Is there anything you want to add?
[00:14:41.23] - Taylor
Don't think so. Just enjoying the city. Great food, expensive, but really nice.
[00:14:47.16] - Gordon
Yeah. Although all of the travel for tourists is free, so all of our public transport to get to and from the convention centre is all free, which is great. You know, all the locals have to pay but as a tourist we get that built into our price of staying, I guess. Anyway, I'm sure you will hear more about our next two days in next week's episodes. I'm sure we'll talk about that. Make sure to go and check out WP Extended. That's very good as well. And that's it for me.
[00:15:24.12] - Taylor
For me as well.
[00:15:25.08] - Gordon
Thank you for joining us. We're gonna go and party now. If you have enjoyed it, please make sure to like, share, subscribe and comment. We're on YouTube as always.
[00:15:35.25] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:15:41.08] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, you can find us on all of your major podcast platforms. Just ask for or look for "This Week with Taylor and Gordon" and we will come up. You can also ask your smart speaker to play "This Week with Taylor and Gordon." We'll be back with you next week, 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:16:06.00] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:16:08.12] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:16:09.00] - Taylor
Bye.
