Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I’m your host, John Overall. Welcome to Episode 25 of Plugin Pulse: WP Plugins A to Z Unplugged — this week’s edition is titled “Randomness in WordPress This Week.” We’re looking at how WordPress’s long public history makes it unusually ready for AI agents, how people are using those same agents to escape rising Mailchimp and MailerLite bills, and the very real drama around the new /random/ endpoint landing in WordPress 7.2 on by default. There’s also a practical Cloudflare WAF ruleset that now includes AI crawl control, a big privacy roundup, a free satirical plugin-business game, and the usual featured tool. Stick around — and yes, I’ll be talking again later about the final stretch of the show.
Coming of a long stretch of development and just launched my latest project at SugarStudios.com
Remember you can Join me Live on Show-days, every second Friday at 12 pm PDT by going to https://wppluginsatoz.com/live and clicking the link to this shows Google Meet Link which goes live at showtime.
If you’re listening to me on YouTube, remember to like and hit the bell to subscribe and get a reminder of when I am here.
You can also join me Sundays at 7PST on Tavern Talk at the Rogues Oasis — where the fire crackles, the ale flows, and straight talk cuts through the night like a rogue’s blade at the Devil’s Crossroad.
We’re back, friends — raw, unfiltered conversations rooted in the wild trails of Vancouver Island and the timeless fight for self-reliance. From homesteading grit and pantry wisdom to the inner wilderness of faith, soul, and everyday storms, we pull up a stool with real talk that arms you for the days ahead.
Live to tape every Sunday ay 7pm PDT
Pull up a chair, grab your mug, and join the fellowship. The door’s open — let’s talk truth.
The Weeks Discussions:
WordPress was waiting for AI
1. WordPress was waiting for AI / “WordPress was born ready for the agentic web”
Source posts
-
Miriam Schwab (@miriamschwab, Head of WordPress at Elementor) on X, 2 Nov 2026:
-
Full article: https://elementor.com/blog/wordpress-born-ready/ (29 Oct 2026)
Core claim
AI agents need sites that machines can read, find, and act on. WordPress has been structured that way since 2003—long before agents existed. One concrete example she gives: ask a model to build a WordPress plugin and it usually knows the patterns, because the entire public corpus (core code, documentation, support forums, ~70,000 plugins, two decades of tutorials and Stack Exchange answers) has been open and scrapable the whole time. Closed platforms don’t get that training advantage when their docs sit behind a login.
Related context that fits the same thread
Miriam has been pushing the “agent-ready” angle hard. In a companion post she walked through the practical proposals that are actually showing up:
-
llms.txt / markdown versions of pages (for reading)
-
structured data and MCP servers (for querying)
-
discovery files (agent.json, etc.)
-
Content Signals (partial trust layer)
-
WebMCP (for taking action)
Elementor 4.4 (beta around late Oct / early Nov 2026, estimated stable ~9 Nov) ships an “Agent Ready” admin screen that scores a site on Find / Read / Act and surfaces fixes (many are single toggles). It includes llms.txt generation, markdown page versions, bot-access controls, and early WebMCP tools. All of it is free and off by default. She has also spoken on this at WordCamp US 2026 (“The Agentic Web Is Coming – Is WordPress Ready?”) and keeps returning to the same point: WordPress’s age and openness are suddenly an asset instead of a liability.
The post is partly positioning Elementor (they power a large slice of WP sites and already ship MCP + Angie), but the underlying observation is broader and useful for the show: the public, long-lived open-source surface area of WordPress is one of the things that makes it unusually tractable for current models and agents.
Leaving mailchimp
2. Leaving Mailchimp (and similar) with AI + FluentCRM
Source posts
-
Pavel Ciorici (@ciorici, WPZOOM / Recipe Block) quoting Katie Keith, 8 Nov 2026:
-
Original Katie Keith (@KatieKeithBarn2) post she quoted, 13 Aug 2026:
What happened
Katie (Barn2 Plugins) had been stuck on Mailchimp for years because migrating templates and automations looked painful. With a $4,000 annual renewal due, she asked Claude to move everything to FluentCRM. It worked. They’re now Mailchimp-free and hosting their own email. The migration itself was smoother than expected; the only hiccup was human error (she accidentally triggered a send to ~3,000–4,000 people by adding tags after the automations were already live).
Pavel is in a similar spot on a MailerLite Classic plan (~€1,400/year). He asked for a discount and got an upsell instead. Seeing Katie’s Claude + FluentCRM result, he’s seriously considering the same move and asked the usual “what should I watch out for?” question. Katie’s reply was practical: tag and segment cleanly before you wire up tag-triggered automations.
Surrounding context
This is part of a wider pattern in 2026. Mailchimp (post-Intuit) has been steadily raising prices and shrinking the free tier; domain trackers and platform-switch surveys show net losses. WordPress-native options like FluentCRM (flat per-site pricing, unlimited contacts, native importer from Mailchimp/MailerLite/etc., sends via your own SES or similar) are the usual landing spot for WP users who are tired of per-contact SaaS bills. AI is lowering the migration friction that used to keep people locked in—export, map fields, rebuild sequences, warm up the new sender. Common gotchas that still apply:
-
Preserve unsubscribe / bounce / suppression status so you don’t re-mail people who opted out.
-
Rebuild automations carefully (the accidental-send story is the cautionary tale).
-
Plan a short parallel-run / warm-up period for deliverability.
-
Decide whether the list lives inside WordPress or stays separate (some people still prefer the latter for blast-radius reasons).
FluentCRM already has a native Mailchimp importer and documented CSV / MCP-assisted paths, so the “Claude did it” approach is less exotic than it would have been a couple of years ago.
WordPress Drama:
No one like fun kill the random
WP Drama :kill the /random/ endpoint in WordPress 7.2
This is the “no one likes fun, kill the random” item. It slots cleanly into “Randomness in WordPress This Week.”
Sources
-
The Repository (Rae Morey), 9 Nov 2026:
-
Announcement post from The Repository on X:
-
Make WordPress Core dev note (Aaron Jorbin, 5 Nov 2026):
What the feature is
WordPress 7.2 (target release 8 Dec 2026) adds a /random/ endpoint that is on by default.
A request to
example.com/random/ does a 302 redirect to a randomly selected published post. It also works on archives:
-
/random/category/release/ → random post in that category
-
/random/author/jorbin/ → random post by that author
-
Similar rules for tags, other public taxonomies, and eligible custom post types
Pages and attachments are excluded. Custom post types are included by default if they are publicly queryable and have an archive. There is no admin toggle; the only way to turn it off is a filter:
add_filter( ‘wp_enable_random_content_redirect’, ‘__return_false’ );
(Best placed in an mu-plugin.) The random base can be changed on the Permalinks screen, but the feature itself stays on unless filtered.
Origin
Trac ticket #64498 was opened in January by Automattic’s Anne McCarthy. It proposed a minimal core implementation at Matt Mullenweg’s request. Matt wanted it considered (originally for 7.0) based on his old Random Redirect plugin (last updated ~18 years ago, still has a small number of active installs). Anne later confirmed on the ticket that Matt asked for it in core multiple times, which is why it was not pursued as a canonical/feature plugin.
Aaron Jorbin (independent core committer) announced it. His line that became the meme:
“If you have a legitimate reason to not support this on a site, or you simply hate fun, there is a filter to disable this entire feature.”
He also posted on LinkedIn that every few releases he builds a new feature for fun, and “for WordPress 7.2, this feature is completely random.”
The pushback
Developers and agencies objected hard, mainly because it is on by default with no UI switch. Common points:
-
Managing dozens or hundreds of client sites means immediately shipping an mu-plugin to kill it.
-
Performance: it uses ORDER BY RAND(), which is O(N) and gets slow on large sites. Testing showed multi-second queries on sites with hundreds of thousands or millions of posts; concurrent requests made it worse. Some hosts already block or throttle this kind of query. Bots could use it as a lightweight DoS vector.
-
Content exposure: sites that use custom post types for semi-private content (invoices, offers, etc.) that are “hidden” mainly by not linking them publicly could see them surface.
-
Governance: critics said it skipped the usual feature-plugin / 80% rule path.
-
Practical bugs: an existing page with the slug random takes precedence (forces a permalink change); cross-domain permalink issues with caching headers (ticket #66625).
Notable reactions:
-
Joost de Valk called default-on a “terrible idea.”
-
Cloudflare’s EmDash team (Matt ‘TK’ Taylor): “EmDash will not add a /random endpoint for fun that you have to opt out of. It’s a serious CMS.”
-
Multiple agency people said they would disable it across their fleets immediately.
-
Stronger takes (“beginning of the end,” “clown show,” etc.) appeared in replies.
Matt’s response
Matt pushed back on the criticism (and on AI-written comments). He asked people to consider whether this is worse than what sites already expose via sitemaps and the REST API, and whether the query is a bigger resource issue than random ?s= search strings. He also noted it was originally requested as a simple /?random style thing rather than a pretty-permalink endpoint.
Current status (as of 13 Nov)
No indication the default-on behavior is being reversed. Beta 5 was scheduled around 10 Nov, RC1 for 17 Nov, final on 8 Dec. Sites that do not want it can disable via the filter in an mu-plugin and flush rewrites. Hosting notes already warn about the rewrite flush after upgrade and the performance characteristics of ORDER BY RAND().
It is classic WordPress drama: a small “fun” feature, requested from the top, shipped on by default with a filter and a quip, colliding with real-world agency and performance concerns. Perfect for the episode title.
WordPress News and Items:
wp checkout summit 2027 https://x.com/rmelogli/status/2110300545860694232
Checkout Summit 2027 is happening again, organized by Rodolfo Melogli of Business Bloomer as the independent, in-person conference specifically for WooCommerce makers. Dates are April 28 through May 1, 2027 at the Saracen Sands Hotel & Congress Centre in Palermo, Sicily. This year’s focus is practical marketing and sales strategies that actually work for WooCommerce products, plugins, services, and agencies, drawing on real case studies rather than theory. It stays small and focused (around 150 people, single track, roughly 12 talks plus workshops and networking), deliberately without livestreams or recordings so people can speak more openly. Early-bird tickets are currently on sale, and Rodolfo recently opened hotel booking directly in the attendee dashboard so ticket holders can pick rooms with photos and live availability (starting around €80 per night including breakfast).
The call for speakers is open, with an honorarium of up to €1,000 for selected talks. Rodolfo has already published a public wishlist of people he’d like to hear from on stage (folks who have grown real WooCommerce products or agencies) while inviting anyone else with proven experience to pitch. It’s not affiliated with Automattic or WooCommerce itself, though the platform was a major sponsor of the 2026 edition. For plugin and product people who want the room full of other people building and selling in the same space, it’s one of the few dedicated IRL options on the calendar.
Cloudflare:
some useful tools
Cloudflare WAF Rules V3 with AI Crawl Control (Web Agency Hero, updated July 2026) is a practical, ready-to-deploy set of custom WAF rules that works on Free, Pro, and Business plans with no plugins or extra code. The V3 update merges the old VPN/hosting/TOR/path rules into one, freeing a slot, and shifts AI blocking to Cloudflare’s native AI Crawl Control (Security → AI Crawl Control). That native control blocks scrapers from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others, stays current as new crawlers appear, and does not consume one of your five free custom-rule slots.
The rules themselves (deployed in order) cover the usual WordPress pain points: Rule 1 allows verified good bots (search engines, monitoring, webhooks, Let’s Encrypt, etc.), Rule 2 challenges aggressive crawlers (Ahrefs, Semrush, Yandex, generic “bot”/“spider” user agents, etc.), Rule 3 challenges large cloud/VPN providers and non-local countries, and Rule 4 challenges VPN/hosting/TOR traffic plus sensitive paths such as wp-login.php, xmlrpc.php, and wp-config.php. Useful extras include a free Cloudflare Rules Deployer tool that pushes the full set (or your own custom expressions) across one or many zones, plus clear setup notes: whitelist your server’s IPv4 and IPv6 addresses so cron jobs are not blocked, set the correct country code in Rule 3, and turn off Onion Routing so it does not fight the TOR rule. For most WordPress sites the combination gives solid protection against bots, credential stuffing, and unauthorized AI scraping without burning rule slots or requiring paid WAF features.
The main official Cloudflare docs for this are:
-
AI Crawl Control overview: https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/
-
Manage AI crawlers (allow/block/charge per crawler): https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/features/manage-ai-crawlers/
-
AI Crawl Control with WAF (how it interacts with custom WAF rules, order of precedence, and extending the rule): https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/configuration/ai-crawl-control-with-waf/
-
AI Crawler and Agent access policies (Search / Agent / Training behaviors): https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/additional-configurations/block-ai-bots/
The second and third links are the most directly useful for the “native AI Crawl Control instead of a custom WAF rule” approach described in the Web Agency Hero post.
Privacy Stuff:
October Privacy News: $25 Billion Verdicts, Robot Lawsuits & AI Surveillance
(Donata Stroink-Skillrud, Termageddon, 2 Nov 2026)
October’s privacy roundup is dominated by a $25 billion jury verdict against Meta in New Mexico. The jury found that Facebook made false or misleading statements by claiming users controlled how their information was shared and by asserting that it did not sell or share personal information with advertisers.
The same month brought a wave of biometric and AI-surveillance cases. Class actions in Chicago accuse robot delivery companies Coco and Serve of violating Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by collecting facial and hand geometry through their cameras and sensors without notice or consent. NOYB filed complaints against Scale AI alleging illegal monitoring of freelance workers who label training data, including up to 19 trackers that record keystrokes and mouse movements every few seconds. Other items include Google’s privacy-policy update tying Gemini/Search personalization to more targeted ads, allegations that Samsung TVs capture ambient audio and share it with hundreds of companies, class actions over misleading email subject lines under Washington’s Commercial Electronic Mail Act, and Pennsylvania expanding its telemarketing law to cover texts, voicemails, and automated communications. The piece is a broad snapshot of how privacy enforcement is expanding into AI training pipelines, physical robots, workplace monitoring, and everyday consumer claims.
Coding Tips:
To completely turn off the new
/random/ URL and redirect feature in WordPress 7.2, you need to apply a PHP filter and flush your site’s permalinks. [1, 2]Follow these two steps to disable it:
Step 1: Add the code snippet
</?php // Disable the WordPress 7.2 random content redirect feature add_filter( ‘wp_enable_random_content_redirect’, ‘__return_false’ );
Add the following line of code to your theme’s
functions.php file, or create a must-use plugin (e.g., wp-content/mu-plugins/disable-random.php) to ensure it stays active regardless of theme changes:Step 2: Flush your permalinks (Crucial)
WordPress stores URL routing rules in your database. Even after adding the code, the /random/ URL will continue to act like a normal page or redirect to your latest posts until you rebuild these rules.
-
Log into your WordPress Admin Dashboard.
-
Navigate to Settings → Permalinks.
-
Simply opening this page triggers WordPress to rebuild its URL rules. (To be completely safe, you can also click Save Changes at the bottom without changing any settings)
What happens next?
Once completed:
• The /random/ URL will now result in a standard “404 – Page Not Found” screen.
• The “Random base” configuration field will disappear from your Permalinks settings page.
• Appending ?random to any URL will be completely ignored
Tip of The Day:
Satirical game on the realities of running a plugin business [FREE]
Link straight to the Game https://pressword.games/games/install-clicker/
Warning it’s mildly addictive…
Upcoming Interviews and Available times:
Reminder that we have no more interviews coming up but you can check out the past ones here https://wppluginsatoz.com/book-an-interview-on-wp-plugins-a-to-z-podcast/
Upcoming Interviews: None
Available interview dates: None.
We are also no longer accepting plugins for review.
Other Shows and places to get WP Info & Training
The WP Builds Podcast
WP Roads
WP-Tonic
Worlds Worst Web Developer
WP Mayor
wp Minute
The WP Week newsletter
Kitchensink WP
Final Fairwell
Okay, at this point I need to talk about what’s happening with WP Plugins A to Z the longest running WordPress Podcast. We’ve reached the final countdown. The show has been magnificent over the years. I started it back in 2009, just after the birth of my youngest son. My oldest was just over two, and you can hear his little evil cackling laugh at the end of every show from the beginning.
After all these years and iterations, I started by myself. For several years I had a co-host, Marcus Couch, and we were fantastic. Life changes forced us to go our own ways. Because it was my property, I took it and continued on a new path for a few years. I brought on an additional guest, Laura, and she lasted about a year or two. Then I went for a few more years by myself until we finally found our footing when my daughter Amber came on the show about four or five years ago. Unfortunately, life changes are in the way again. She had to leave the show this past summer due to health reasons, and that has put an additional burden on me to keep it going. The magic is no longer there. It’s becoming more of a slog, and unfortunately it just can’t be done anymore.
I am going to continue the show out to the end of the year. We’ve got four shows left after this one — two each month in November and December — with the final one released on Christmas morning. That will not be a live show; it will be pre-recorded. I’ll see if I can grab a couple of voices from times past to showcase what’s been done, and we’ll make it a good finale so everyone can close out the end of an era.
The WP Plugins website and the rest of it will remain. Sometime in the near future there will be a store in place for the purchase and downloading of plugins that never quite make it to the repo, for whatever reasons — because they’re not allowed, or because they don’t like them. That would include any plugins I’ve been writing that I want to release there, outside my GitHub. There’s lots that’s going to happen in that aspect. WP Plugins will be around, and we’ll continue on X sharing news and information. The WP Plugins A to Z team will remain in the WordPress community, occasionally poking fun at the bear. But this platform here, as far as I go, we’re shutting it down.
I’m not stopping podcasting. You’ll find me in another realm. I’ve started a new podcast, the Tavern Talk Podcast, which is a godcast, and you’ll find it very relevant if you’ve got other things going on in this world. You can find that over at The Rogues Oasis, a site for people looking to make really good food for themselves, find quality local products if you happen to live on Vancouver Island and in BC, and lots of other great stuff.
I’ll be making an announcement like this on every episode to the end of the year. Thank you everyone for 17.5 years of listening. And for those who joined in the last few years, thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure, and it helped give me the energy to move this forward and bring it to where it’s at now.
With that being said, we’re going to close out this show. Thank you very much. We pretty much covered everything. Have yourselves a good day, and I’ll see you next show.
