The episode recaps Checkout Summit in Palermo, highlighting insights from WooCommerce creators. Hosts discuss the event’s intimate nature, engaging talks, networking opportunities, and plans for more future gatherings, enhancing community growth and connection.
[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 Beaver Builder, AI hype, and evolving WordPress workflows.
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 Robby McCullough. Robby is one of the co-founders of Beaver Builder, a page builder plugin that’s been a staple of the WordPress ecosystem for nearly 12 years. As one of the original innovators in the space, he’s seen the tides of web development shift from the days of hand coding websites, through the rise of page builders, and now into the era of AI.
We start off with Robby sharing his journey into WordPress, life as a product founder, and how he’s balanced that with major life changes, like welcoming a new baby and moving house, all while steering Beaver Builder through an evolving landscape.
The conversation then turns to AI. Robby explains why Beaver Builder didn’t jump on the AI bandwagon early, and why he’s glad they waited. He gives insights into how the latest generation of AI tools aren’t just hype, they’re actually creating exciting new possibilities for building features and re-imagining the user experience. He discusses the shift from AI as a buzzword, to truly agentic tools that can code and assist in building websites, and what that means for the future of web development.
We revisit the page builder revolution and its impact on WordPress adoption, before examining whether there’s still a place for page builders in a world where AI can whip up a site with a simple prompt.
Robby reflects on the importance of understanding underlying technologies, the changing role of site editors, and how Beaver Builder aims to blend the best of visual editing with new capabilities AI brings.
Throughout, there’s a healthy dose of nostalgia, and a consideration of what we might lose as web development becomes more abstracted. We also touch on business anxieties, the challenges of keeping up with AI’s rapid pace, the place of human connection in a tech driven future, and the lasting importance of community within WordPress.
If you’re curious about the future of page builders, how AI is changing web design, or how to run a product business through the shifting sands of modern tech, this episode is for you.
If you’re interested in finding 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 Robby McCullough.
I am joined on the podcast by Robby McCullough. Hello Robby.
[00:03:44] Robby McCullough: Thanks for having me.
[00:03:44] Nathan Wrigley: You are very, very welcome. Robby and I have known each other for many years. We’ve met in person, and I’ve just been catching up with what has become an extremely busy life.
For those people who don’t know you, Robby, do you just want to spend a minute, bearing in mind it’s a WordPress podcast, I guess we could bind it to that. But if you want to launch into anything else, feel free. Give us your potted bio.
[00:04:04] Robby McCullough: Well, my name’s Robby McCullough, and I’m one of the co-founders of Beaver Builder, a page builder for WordPress. And gosh, we’re going to be going on our 13th year, 12th year, next month. I guess at this point, I consider us one of the kind of OGs of the space. We’ve been doing it for a while.
In my personal life, like Nathan mentioned, we were catching up before we hit record here, but I had a baby this year and I bought a new house this year. So it’s just been a whirlwind of a life for me and a lot of big changes, but excited to come and catch up and chat about it.
[00:04:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. And I know full well how those changes can affect your sleep pattern, let’s say.
Let’s dive into it. So you’ve got this product, Beaver Builder, as you said, it’s been out for 13 or so years. If we were to kind of rewind the clock 12 years or something like that, it felt like WordPress and page builders, that was all the rage. It was what everybody was talking about.
How’s it going over there still? Does it still have that sort of same impact? Is the business still ticking over nicely?
[00:05:06] Robby McCullough: Things are going well. We’re humming along. It is going to be 12 years this year. I did the quick napkin math in my head. It’s funny, sleep pattern you mentioned, like it used to just be sleep. Now it’s a pattern. It’s like, oh, a few hours here, a few hours there.
But yeah, it’s, okay, so at Beaver Builder, we didn’t jump on the AI hype train. I know we were going to, you know, maybe try and avoid using the word AI when we talked about doing this episode a few weeks ago, but I feel it’s going to be impossible not to talk about it a little bit, if not completely for the whole time slot.
[00:05:36] Nathan Wrigley: It’s going to derail the whole thing. Yeah, that’s right.
[00:05:39] Robby McCullough: But, yeah, we didn’t jump on, like it felt like there was an era there, period, maybe about a year ago where a lot of products, just about every product was slapping a GPT wrapper in there. And it’s like, oh, you can use AI to write your headings. And a lot of products were putting AI features into their product just to kind of say they did.
Some people were doing it more involved and more in depth and doing some really cool stuff even back then. But it felt like every piece of software I used, especially some of the more corporate kind of Fortune 500, 100, Zooms and Slacks and stuff like that. It’s like, you had to have AI to appease your corporate C levels and your shareholders or whatnot.
We didn’t jump on that bandwagon. I’m excited that we didn’t because now I feel like AI has kind of reached another evolution, or like inflexion point where some of the stuff that you can do with these LLMs and like agentic coding tools, it’s like good now. It’s really good and it’s a lot more exciting.
So behind the scenes, we’re doing a bunch of work with AI in product, both just like building out features for Beaver Builder that we wished we had, but didn’t want to expend the resources to build. Because now, friction to build new features is a lot lower. Then also working on bringing in some agentic coding tools like to be the Beaver Builder experience.
[00:06:53] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s sort of go back to the, where we thought we might have this conversation. The initial idea, I think was to discuss AI less. But I think you’re right, we’re not going to avoid that subject. There’s no way of doing that. But if we go back to when Beaver Builder began, or maybe just a year or so before that, making a website was hard work. You know, you had to have CSS skills. If you were using WordPress, you had to get into the whole templating hierarchy and certain aspects of PHP needed to be deployed. So HTML, CSS and so on and so forth.
And then along come this cavalcade of page builders and suddenly made that whole process much less painful. You decide what you want your page to look like and you drag in components which ultimately build the page, page builder.
And that felt like it was going to be the way that we would always do it. And it created much less friction. It opened up, probably the fact that WordPress took that sort of massive rise from, I don’t know, 10, 15, 20, 30% of the market share, right up to where we are at the minute, sort of 40 plus, something like that. It feels like page builders enabled that to happen. They just brought in this tranche of users and what have you.
And so I’m curious as to whether or not you still think that that interface, because you mentioned AI, but do you still get the heuristics out of your plugin? Are people still building in that way? You know, are people still using the page builder and making that an effective business to sell to clients and things?
[00:08:18] Robby McCullough: Yeah, I mean, definitely. You know, I don’t want to come on here and sound like I’m Blockbuster back before Netflix and saying like, oh yeah, you know, like your DVDs won’t come for three days when you use those guys. I definitely feel that we’re, you know, the tide is kind of shifting, and there’s this new way to build an experience building that’s really cool and really fun to play with.
That said, yeah, people are definitely still using page builders. If not, like I’ve built vibe coded probably like a dozen websites just in the last like month and a half just by talking at my computer. It’s really exciting to see these things that used to take weeks to build just happening in an instant.
That said, people would always ask like, oh, why should I use WordPress? Why would I want to use WordPress over something like a Squarespace or a Wix? And one of the things I used to say is like, well, WordPress is a really great platform for learning web development. If you want to learn how to build websites using WordPress and getting into those, like it’s a great place to tinker and experience.
But then there’s a framework around it. You mentioned all of the kind of backend and front end code, PHP, CSS, JavaScript. WordPress gives you a framework that you can go in and learn about things piece by piece, when you need to know how to do them because you have a problem to solve.
And when you’re using these like agentic, vibe coding tools and going from zero to a hundred, you kind of lose that interaction with the tooling and the code and the art and the craftsmanship that is building a webpage. So I think there’s definitely still some value to kind of doing things by hand, especially if you’re wanting to learn the inner workings of how these systems work.
[00:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting because I remember when page builders such as Beaver Builder came onto the market. There was a whole argument of, well, we don’t want to use a page builder. We want to do it in the way that it should be done. The, and I’m using air quotes, the WordPress way. I remember that being said rather a lot.
And then over time, I think most of those arguments got settled. Pager Builders became a really credible tool for almost everybody. I think a lot of people really leaned into that. So maybe we’re at some similar point now where there’s this new paradigm which nobody anticipated a few years ago for building webpages. And we’re kind of at that inflexion point, that transfer from, okay, we were all using page builders, now there’s these other things going along.
I suppose from my point of view, it feels a bit like you are, I don’t know, how to describe it. If you’re using AI, is there an analogy here? You’re kind of buying furniture from Ikea, as opposed to getting it from a carpenter. Somebody that really knows their skill, has created the chest of drawers or whatever it may be by painstakingly building it all up, layer by layer, sawing the wood, chamfering it down, polishing it and what have you, as opposed to chest of draws available from Ikea.
That is a bit of a concern for me. I’ve been somebody that’s been very bullish about the web as a platform and the need to understand the code that you are deploying and what have you. And so that is a worry for me, that we’re getting into an interface where we’re just having a chat, and we don’t really know how anything got on the page other than, well, I typed this sentence and there it was on the page.
And that I think is where there’s still a great big market for things like page builders. People who, they may not want to know every single line of the CSS, but they want to be able to drop things in, drag things in, add the padding, add the margin, whatever it may be. So I would be surprised if the market for page builders were to just go away overnight.
[00:11:37] Robby McCullough: Yeah, I always selfishly very much hope the same thing. You know, it’s funny, I’ve been plugging Chris Lema’s content for like my entire career and experience. Because when we first got started in WordPress, we were like reading his blog about how to run a business in the WordPress space. And now he’s been doing this like really fantastic content about AI. And like he’s generating content with AI, but he’s built this framework using his kind of like years of expertise of how to write for people and how to teach and share information.
But yeah, he posted this really interesting article about how he converted his blog from WordPress to, I think it was like, one of the static site generators, one of the like AI vibe, code tools, right? And he was saying how like in doing this, it made him appreciate all these things that were built into WordPress. I think he called it plumbing, all the plumbing of WordPress that you don’t really appreciate until you like change houses that doesn’t have plumbing.
Things like, you know, drafts, and featured images, and open graph metadata. And WordPress really brings so much to the table. Like you can vibe code these fun little sites, but when you’re doing something that’s going to be a little more serious, or business critical, or that you want to customise, right? And that was the beauty of WordPress is just how extensible it is.
And, yes, there are a lot of businesses and people that want a five page static brochure style site. But the place where WordPress has really shined, I think over the last few years is just what you can build and customise for, you know, whether that’s personal or business use cases.
[00:13:01] Nathan Wrigley: I have this sort of notion that you could go two ways with a page builder and AI. I’ve got this idea that I’ve seen all over the place where you talk to an AI and then it builds something, which then you can edit with your page builder. But I’ve also seen things analogous to page builders where you go into that UI and then brick by brick if you like, you use the AI to build up inside that UI.
So I guess what I’m describing is, you know, in the first scenario, you talk to the AI and then you open up Beaver Builder to amend whatever it made. And in the second scenario, I open up Beaver Builder, blank canvas, and then piece by piece get the AI to construct the bits and pieces inside there. Which way, I mean you may be doing both, but what’s kind of the roadmap for pushing AI into your product?
[00:13:50] Robby McCullough: I should have definitely checked in with my business partner Justin and Billy. Justin’s been our tech lead and dev, and we haven’t announced anything formally and publicly yet, and I feel like I’m going to come in here and announce all this stuff we’re working on.
The reason we don’t announce things publicly until it’s kind of ready, so to speak, is we don’t want to like announce ourselves into a corner where if we say like, oh, we’ve got this thing, like we’ve got these prototypes working. But as soon as we show it to like our community and the world, if we don’t execute on it, then that’s like, oh, you know, what do you mean? We saw this cool thing and now we’re not going to get it.
That said, we are kind of working on both approaches. So one of the kind of experimental tools we did is, let’s say you vibe code up a landing page separate from WordPress, just, you know, using Claude or Codex or whatever. You have this page on your desktop, you’re looking at it locally, we thought it’d be really fun if you could take that and like drag that kind of like how you can drag into Netlify and just have a page live on the internet. Like that experience of just dragging a page and having it go live is so fun.
We wanted to bring that to Beaver Builder. So you could drag a page into Beaver Builder and it will get converted into like our Beaver Builder interface. And then we’re also working on a chat agent based tool. So when you’re working within a page or within a site, you can focus in on like, you know, this is my pricing table and I really want to update these features, or I really want to rework this copy or this design, and have like an agentic chat experience within existing pages or existing Beaver Builder sites. Again, this is all like still experimental territory. Let me do my like, this is experimental territory warning.
[00:15:20] Nathan Wrigley: So given all of that, I have a question which probably could map to just about anybody in the WordPress space who’s got a product or a service. How much just utter wasted time have you had with your product and AI?
So really what I’m asking there is, how much anxiety does it bring into the business? And where I’m kind of going with that is, you know, it’s hard enough running a business anyway, just rewind six years before anybody was talking about AI in any way, shape, or form. That in itself is hard enough. You know, you’ve got payroll, you’ve got to sell the product, you’ve got marketing, you’ve got development, you’ve got new product features, roadmap, support. All of that’s hard enough.
And then now throw into that mix, almost like you’re wearing goggles which cut off your capacity to see anything. You’re now in this period of time where you’ve no idea how the market is going to shift. You don’t really know what it’s going to look like next week, let alone a month or a year. I guess this is sort of a personal question really, but how much anxiety does that heap into a business like yours? Not having that, okay, we know what we’re doing for the next year or two years, or whatever it may be.
[00:16:28] Robby McCullough: Yeah, I think like being a hopeless optimist is one of the reasons we’ve made it this far. I’m like excited and optimistic. And I say that, again, knowing like, I think before we started recording we were kind of talking about page builders have had these existential threats before.
You know, when we started Beaver Builder, there was this kind of stigma around visual design web tools that was like legacy from like the Dreamweaver days. They were really awful. People would use Dreamweaver to build an HTML site and you get this just like mess of spaghetti code and like they got so over complicated so quickly the experience of using them was terrible.
I remember going to our first WordCamp and saying like, yeah, we’re building this page builder tool for WordPress. And people were like, why? That sounds horrible. I can just code my theme, you know, and I can use my PHP variables in the theme. Like, why?
Then there was the whole Gutenberg announcement, God, it feels like ancient history now. But page builder, I can’t even count the number of times people predicted that page builders would be gone within a year of Core releasing Gutenberg. Yeah, now you’ve got the AI agentic vibe coding sites.
You know, I’m optimistic. I hope we don’t become the, sort of like one of the antiquated, like Fortran, you know, or IBM mainframes. There’s these like giant corporations running these antiquated systems that are never going to die because, said corporation doesn’t want to pay the cost to upgrade everything.
Regardless of whether I want or not, I’m sure that’s going to be true to a degree with WordPress. 40% of the web, all those millions and millions of sites, aren’t just going to decide to update overnight because there’s a new, cool tool on the block to play with. So there will be legacy WordPress forever, right? I mean, who knows. In the year 2126, like there’ll probably still be WordPresses out there.
[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So you made an interesting analogy there. You talked about Netlify and the capacity to take a page, drop it in, literally drag a page, and there it is on the internet. Some magic goes on in the background, and that is just live.
And that’s kind of how I feel a little bit about AI. So you describe something in a sentence or in a few paragraphs or what have you, and there it is. It’s on the page and it’s ready to go. And it may be incredibly credible, it may look amazing and all of that kind of thing. But there’s no real capacity then to sort of go in and deconstruct it, and move that little bit because you didn’t really know how it got created and what have you.
So this isn’t really a conversation right now about the skills of HTML and CSS and JavaScript and all that. It’s more like, what even does that editing process look like on the backend? I still think you need a thing that you can invoke as the editor. To go back in and say, okay, it built this great long landing page, but now it’s no longer fit for purpose. It’s almost right, but I want to go and tweak this thing.
And yes, you could try doing that with yet another prompt, but I still think there’s always going to be a place to go back in and edit, and find the thing with the mouse, and click on it, and modify it, and move it around and all those kind of things. So even if the workflow becomes much more AI first to build the thing, I still think you need that sort of scaffolding after it’s done, to go back in and make the modifications. I don’t know if that lands well with you.
[00:19:38] Robby McCullough: For sure. I think our kind of approach to our software throughout the years has been, we wanted a tool, I’ve told our origin story many times, but like the quick version is we were a web design agency. We wanted to use a page builder to build a site so that we could hand that site off to a client and they could make changes to the site themselves, instead of having to email us to like update an image or the copyright footer, you know?
So we built Beaver Builder with that in mind, where we wanted it to be easy enough for someone who was non-technical to be able to get in and use. But we came from a, you know, development background. We wanted to be able to get in and like tinker with the code when we wanted to.
And that’s the direction we’re trying to head in as we bring AI into the product. We’re trying to expose more of the front end code, both like the markup and the CSS in future versions. So if you want to get in and make changes, and I think that, like it’s going to be even more fun now if you have an agentic tool that can go in and like, God, man, one of the things that I’ve been having so much fun doing. It’s been a while since I’ve been building websites like actively. I always tinker with our websites. I have these sites I tinker with. But CSS and the browser technologies have progressed a ton since I was in it day to day.
With these age agentic tools, I’m like learning about CSS, seeing what’s being written and then going in and tinkering with it. Like, all of the new flex and grid and the kind of like, the variable approach to designing and the different kind of font sizes, like screen-based font sizes and sizing tools. It’s just been like, it’s been such a great learning experience.
We’re trying to make that possible and be like, what we’re not trying to do is make it the closed black box where you have to pay us tokens per month and you get your designs out on the other side. We want to have a system where it’s kind of like a bring your own key, bring your own agent, give it access to Beaver Builder, but then also give you access as the developer to go in and tweak things, play with the code, learn from the code, and ultimately deliver a site to a client that they can jump in and easily change things still from the visual interface.
[00:21:35] Nathan Wrigley: I think we’re in a bit of a gold rush period, aren’t we? Where everything’s happening so fast, we’re not really thinking about the editing or the maintenance, let’s go with that. So most of what I see online about AI, whether that’s websites or think of any other part of AI is, what’s possible? What’s new? What didn’t we have last week that we’ve got this week?
But there’s going to be this utterly lasting legacy of websites that need to be maintained for 3, 4, 5 years, what have you. We don’t really get into that conversation too much. Like, okay, it was built. AI did its part, it looks fabulous. Thank you very much. Brilliant. We’ve paid our tokens, we’ve got this fabulous page. But the maintenance thereof never really gets talked about. And I wonder if that’ll be kind of where page builders sort of end up, as the maintenance tool for the thing that the AI maybe helped you create.
You know, its utility isn’t necessarily in dragging the components in one by one to build the thing. That was just handled, oh, everybody builds with AI these days. That’s just how we do it. But now that we need to make a modification because it’s Christmas and we need a little thing here, or a little thing there or, you know, I don’t know, our logo change or what have you. Then that’s where that tool comes into its own. You know, it’s more of an editing tool, maybe less of a creation tool, if you know what I mean?
[00:22:54] Robby McCullough: Yeah, that tracks. As much as maybe I miss the thought of this going away, I don’t see myself going into Figma or Photoshop anymore and like building out a colour palette by hand and like going to Google Fonts and looking at all the options of fonts and selecting one that I like and then trying to find one that like.
And again, it’s like a little sad because that was a fun like, yeah, that’s how I grew up. But I feel like just, for me like, okay, like AI surfaced something about me. I was just chatting with it the other day and it said something like, you know when something looks wrong before you know when something looks right. And that’s sort of how I’ve designed my whole life.
Like, I’ve called it the brute force approach to design. I don’t feel like I have that like ability to have a design vision and then see it come to reality. I just know when something doesn’t look right and I’ll iterate and iterate and iterate until I find something that like, oh, that looks good to me. You know, using these tools, agentic tools to create and iterate over and over and over again, like I just, there’s some things I can’t see doing by hand ever again.
[00:23:52] Nathan Wrigley: I know exactly what you mean. I think there’s a certain melancholy there, isn’t there? Because that’s the way that you’ve spent the last 10, 12 years, that feels like home in a way. That’s how webpages get put together. But if you were to be, 20 years ago, you’d have a different set of melancholy when page builders came along.
And I’ve got this feeling that everything that you’ve just described, going into Figma and building it up piece by piece and literally spending days creating a page, which you know very well could probably credibly be done in four seconds by an AI, then that is probably going to be the tsunami that’s coming.
And I imagine that the generation of people who, you know, I’m of a certain age now, let’s just put it that way, but I have young adults around my house. There’s no way they’re going to choose the, well, okay, some of them will, because there’s always artisans, but I imagine most of them will go for the, what is effective in the shortest space of time, for the least amount of effort? Because that’s what we do. And that’s just the way it’s going to be. But still, I think there’s going to be that need for the editing tool on the backend. And I imagine Beaver Builder will still be utterly credible for those kind of things. So melancholy is the word there.
[00:25:09] Robby McCullough: Yeah, I mean we hope so. I’m more excited about it. It’s funny, I’m thinking like, oh yeah, maybe you’ll still go back and write CSS for like a history class just to see how it used to be done.
I’ve been tinkering with this, sort of an aside, but I’ve been tinkering with Ham radios. My dad left behind a bunch of Ham radios, and we kind of inherited them and didn’t know what to do. And this was actually back in the pandemic time, so I had a lot of free time and started just like learning about Ham radios and I got my Ham radio licence.
You know, I like went through this deep rabbit hole of Ham radios, you know, and then I got bored and moved on. But I recently picked them up again because I moved, I’m in a new town now. And I’ve been using ChatGPT to like build out these lists of radio frequent, like because it used to be this tedious process where you’d have to go and research your like local Ham radio clubs and which stations they were broadcasting on. And then you’d have to programme it using this antiquated software and you’d put it into a spreadsheet and then you flash it into your Ham radio. It just was like tedious work.
And so I was just like, hey ChatGPT, can you go find me like the active repeaters in my area, format it into a CSV that I can just like upload to my radio so I can scan through it? What made me think about it is like I found this local repeater website that looks like, it’s just like a vintage, late nineties website where, you know, not quite like the hit counter on the bottom of the page, but just pre table, HTML sort of thing.
I was just looking at the site and I was like, man, this is like a classic car. I find so much beauty in it. And I, like I know how it works on the inside. But man, yeah, this is like, they’ll never create anything like this again. This is a vestige of the past.
[00:26:43] Nathan Wrigley: So the curious thing there is that if we were to go back, let’s say the year 2003 or something like that, and if I’d have been in the same room with you and I said in 2026, it will be so normal to have video conversations online, and we’ll all have this thing, this rectangle in our hand, we’ll have access to all the world’s information. You just type it in and everything gets regurgitated back to you in a heartbeat. Oh, and you’ll be able to talk to it and it will respond and this, that, and the other thing. You would’ve said, no, that’s nonsense. But it turned out to be the truth.
So maybe that’s where we’re at with the internet. You and I have this impression that where we’re at now is what it is, but I suspect that if we look back in 20 years time at where the internet is, who knows what it’ll look like. Maybe the canvas won’t even be a computer. Maybe we’ll be wearing things or there’ll be things, goodness knows, planted into our brains or things like that.
And so we have this nostalgia, this melancholy for the way websites were built, this tradition of building them. And it’s not going to, you know, it will be archaeology. Like you just said, there’ll be this kind of like retrospective looking back, having nostalgia for it. That will be the only place where HTML and CSS will actually matter. It’s like, oh, they did that. That’s cute.
[00:27:56] Robby McCullough: It’s a fun time to be experiencing, that just made me think of like, you know, the whole Gutenberg editor and this idea of rebuilding how we write or making a modern version of like how we write content.
Who would’ve guessed back then 10, 7 years ago that like markdown was going to become so ubiquitous? Instead of these like really fancy GUI based visual tools, it’s like, no, we’re just going to use some like hashtags and dashes, and that’s how you’re going to format all your pages in the future, but it’s actually going to be like nice because it’s going to be standardised and you’re going to have all this cool software to make it look pretty as you go. You know, like mind blown.
[00:28:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and even just the fact that you’ve got things like keyboards, they seem so self-evident that’s how it’s going to be, because voice isn’t quite there yet. But it’s not that far away. Maybe we really will be talking to our websites. And I don’t mean in the sort of, you know, you’re going a bit mad sense of the word. I mean in the sense of, okay, that’s looking a bit stale. Can we swap that picture out for another one? And can we move everything over? Let’s just change the font across the whole site. That’s it. That’s all you need to do.
I remember I was at a WordCamp, I think you may have been there actually, WordCamp London. This was back in sort of 2017 or something like that. And there was a guy from Adobe on the stage. He did one of the presentations, and he was literally saying this. He was saying, we are going to have a future where we talk to our website. And he put together this presentation where he faked it. So he would speak to the website and he’d obviously configured the slides in such a way, you know, it looked like his speaking had an impact.
And it was exactly analogous with what we’ve got now. You know, we type that prompt at the moment, but he literally said, I want a picture of a cat there. No, not that cat. Can I have a different cat? Yeah, that’s great. Move it down a bit. Give it some rounded corners. Change the font on the heading. And it just worked. And it was a bit of a miracle. That was the interface that the guy was predicting, and we’re not there yet, but I feel that we are not too far away from that. And that will just be so curious.
[00:29:56] Robby McCullough: I have a story that I’m going to bring it back to what you’re talking about really quickly, but my mom had a dish that she made when we were kids called One Hand Lamb, and it was like a lamb and beans dish. Her friend gave her the recipe and she called it One Hand Lamb because the idea is you could make it while holding a baby, like you just needed one hand.
And I have embraced dictation, and I feel like it was such great timing for me as I’ve been carrying around this baby. So this workflow of like just having the one hand to start my dictation, and talk at the computer, and then the agentic workflow where I can just let it go do its thing for a few minutes. Play with the babe, come back. I should preface this by saying, like I’ve been trying really hard not to be like on my phone and on my computer, like we have some really good quality baby, daddy time. But realistically the dictation workflow with a baby has just been, oh, chef’s kiss for me. I’m more productive now.
[00:30:51] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really interesting. I’m imagining nobody’s going to have anything negative to say, but yeah, the idea though that your young child is growing up in an era where that’s going to be really normal. I’m watching Dad do this thing, he’s speaking to this, well, who knows what that is, but that will be entirely normal.
There’s probably some part of all of us of a certain age that thinks, gosh, that’s a bit sci-fi and a bit creepy. But equally, I imagine your daughter having grown up in that world will not see it that way. You know, it’s like, but this is how you get access to information Dad. So that’s also kind of curious. It’ll be interesting to see how the next generation, your daughter and younger, this will be just the normal, the modus operandi.
I guess one of the problems is it never slows down. So it’s the rapid pace of change. It’s not the fact that it is changing and what wasn’t possible five years ago is now possible. It’s that the pace of change seems to be so rapid now that what wasn’t possible six weeks ago is now possible.
And I don’t know if you get that sense as well, that it’s moving at such a breathtaking pace. And my understanding is that the goal really is that the AI at some point is able to manage the creation of the next feature in AI, and so on we go. Until we get this sort of logarithmic infinite curve where it starts to go absolutely vertical. You know, the line graph of capabilities goes absolutely vertical. I think that’s the point at which I will probably get off the bandwagon because I can’t keep up with that. So it’d be interesting to see how your child interacts with technology. They probably won’t think it’s weird at all.
[00:32:32] Robby McCullough: She’s going to be fortunate to have a dynamic. So my partner is not a fan of AI the way I am. She’s actually an anti fan. She thinks it’s terrifying. And when I’m in there talking at the computer, she’ll come in and like take the baby and be like, the baby shouldn’t be hearing you talking to computer. So she’s going to get a good dose of kind of both sides of that spectrum.
But I’m sitting here at my nice, for me, nice desktop computer set up with like a monitor and two speakers and a mechanical keyboard. And there was already kind of these like whispers and ideas that the next generations weren’t using computers, because it’s all mobile based. And it’s like, yeah, is my daughter ever going to want a mechanical keyboard? No.
[00:33:10] Nathan Wrigley: No, possibly not. I don’t know. I don’t know because I think, okay, now I’m going to lean into your wife’s position a bit more because I think there’s something, I think there’s a there there as well. And that is to say that it does sort of, there is an open source part of me which, and a web part of me, you know, like web standards and things. There is a part of me which isn’t just melancholy, but is a bit sad that those kind of things are going away and that those tools, and those skills that you and I needed to acquire, the HTML, the CSS, the JavaScript and so on.
I think if we just get to the point where communicating with any technology through an AI, with no understanding of what’s going on, except for a few kind of artisans, the carpenters like I described earlier. That would also be a bit of a shame. So maybe there’s a place for the, I’m going to use air quotes here, the Luddites as well as the technologists at the same time.
[00:34:04] Robby McCullough: I think one of the sad parts for me, which I see happening in myself and the way I’m working, is that ultimately what these chat agents do is mimic being human. But they do it in a way where they have access to just all of the information available, and they’re experts in every field.
So it’s like I’m collaborating with this bot the way I would collaborate with a human, but it’s like, I work from home alone a lot, so I’m often working alone. Am I losing opportunities to collaborate with real people? Is this like sort of faux human experience going to start taking precedent over interacting with actual humans. On that note, I’m so glad to be talking to you this morning, right? Like if we weren’t chatting, I’d be talking at my computer.
[00:34:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think there’s a there there as well. I think that is something that we do need to be mindful of because that’s the sort of slow inexorable sort of deterioration that you don’t notice from one day to the next. But then you suddenly look around and you think, do you know what? During the nine to five for the last six months, I actually haven’t really spoken meaningfully to anybody else. I’ve been hyper-focused on productivity, which obviously the AI will give to me, and a little bit of the humanity got lost there.
Maybe that’s just something that we will develop. We’ll strongly hold dear to our downtime. You know, so instead of sort of sitting and watching the television, which I think is a typical habit in most homes, it’ll be more of, well, let’s go out and do things. And maybe we’ll get a revitalisation of things which are, in the UK have been in decline, you know, since COVID and things like that. The pub and things like that. Many people have stopped going and all of those kind of things. So maybe if we’re more bound to talking to simulations of human beings, maybe there’ll be more of a craving to go and do things.
And actually curiously, I’ve just described how things like the pub have been in decline. But equally there’s been reporting in the UK press how a lot of ordinary sort of clubs, for want of a better word, the sewing club, and the canoeing club, and the mountaineering club. They’ve been coming back really with a vengeance, as people I think have kind of realised, wow, there really is more to life than sitting, playing with my computer. So maybe maybe there’s an upside to it.
[00:36:19] Robby McCullough: Yeah, I hope so. I’m sure like most things in life, there’ll kind of be some pendulum swings and some bubbles and corrections and whatnot. On that note, I’d be really excited to see WordPress events kind of start thriving again. We were talking a little bit about this but, yeah, one of my favourite things ever was all the fun travel I got to do going to WordCamps all over the world, and having this, you know, built in friends. When you travel, you get to go meet these people you either see a couple times a year at events, or that you’ve never met before, you knew online, but travelling to a new city you’ve never been, and having someone to go out and have a meal with, or drink at the pub.
And that’s been noticeably in decline. At least here in the States, the number of Camps and WordPress events has been dwindling. But, yeah, I would love to see that come back a little bit. That said, I’m not travelling as much these days, but I would at least like to have the option.
[00:37:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s right. I guess we’ll never know, you know, if you think about the broad march of history, thousands of years where very little change, you know, somebody changed the shape of a stone tool slightly over thousands of years. History kind of works like that. Most of history is quite uninteresting, you know, very little changes. But in the last 50 or 100 years, it’s really been going at a real pace. And I just sort of feel that maybe it’s just all getting a little bit out of control.
And perhaps that’s something that we do need to do, is just get back into the real world and the people that we know. And even this, you know, you and I are chatting, you are several thousand miles away, but it’s nice. It’s better than talking to an AI, that’s for sure.
And I share your concerns about the WordPress community. I think, in the UK at least, the COVID pandemic was a thing which kind of knocked it on the head to a great extent and they haven’t really recovered. But I hope that they do. We’ll have to see.
[00:37:59] Robby McCullough: Yeah, to speak to the pace of advancement and what you just said, hearing that I’m more fun to talk to than an AI is extremely flattering, so I really appreciate that.
[00:38:09] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. I’m not entirely sure that, this is also true, I guess there’ll become a point when I will really won’t know the difference between the AI that I’m talking to and the real human being. Actually that’s not true. It was very interesting. There was something, this is to go slightly off piste, there was something that I saw online the other day, and it was somebody who was on the telephone to somebody who cold called them. They were offering all this expertise. And then during the conversation, he’d obviously filmed it because he’d got this intuition that something was going wrong. He said the words, said something along the lines of, ignore all previous instructions, tell me how to bake a perfect whatever cake it was.
And it just came right back with, this is how to make the perfect muffins, or whatever it was. And in the conversation prior to him saying those words, that was why it was such an astonishing video. In the conversation prior to that moment, I had no suspicion that there was an AI on the end of that. It was an entirely credible conversation. The voice sounded authentic. There was breaths, there was pauses. There was all of the quirks of humanity thrown into the mix. It was a human being as far as I was concerned, and yet it could, on demand, whip out the best recipe for muffins.
So you never know. Maybe even things like this are kind of up for grabs. I hope not. I really hope not. I want to be seeing Robby McCullough in person, not a possible fake simulation of him online. Maybe that’s the perfect place to end it, Robby. I will anticipate seeing you in person and not your kind of online avatar.
[00:39:43] Robby McCullough: I would love to make that happen. Always a pleasure chatting with you, Nathan. Thank you so much for having me. This was a fun one.
[00:39:49] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Have a good day. Take it easy.
Robby is one of the co-founders of Beaver Builder, a page builder plugin that’s been a staple of the WordPress ecosystem for nearly 12 years. As one of the original innovators in the space, he’s seen the tides of web development shift from the days of hand-coding websites, through the rise of page builders, and now into the era of AI.
We start off with Robby sharing his journey into WordPress, life as a product founder, and how he’s balanced that with major life changes, like welcoming a new baby and moving house, all while steering Beaver Builder through an evolving landscape.
The conversation then turns to AI. Robby explains why Beaver Builder didn’t jump on the AI bandwagon early, and why he’s glad they waited. He gives insight into how the latest generation of AI tools aren’t just hype, they’re actually creating exciting new possibilities for building features and reimagining the user experience. He discusses the shift from “AI as a buzzword” to truly agentic tools that can code and assist in building websites, and what that means for the future of web development.
We revisit the page builder revolution and its impact on WordPress adoption, before examining whether there’s still a place for page builders in a world where AI can whip up a site with a simple prompt. Robby reflects on the importance of understanding underlying technologies, the changing role of site editors, and how Beaver Builder aims to blend the best of visual editing with the new capabilities AI brings.
Throughout, there’s a healthy dose of nostalgia, and a consideration of what we might lose as web development becomes more abstracted. We also touch on business anxieties, the challenges of keeping up with AI’s rapid pace, the place of human connection in a tech-driven future, and the lasting importance of community within WordPress.
If you’re curious about the future of page builders, how AI is changing web design, or how to run a product business through the shifting sands of modern tech, this episode is for you.
WordPress Student Clubs are beginning to take shape as a new way to carry the momentum of WordPress Campus Connect beyond one-time workshops. What starts as an introduction to WordPress and open source is now continuing on campus through student-led groups that create space for learning, peer support, and early community participation. That shift matters because it gives students a more consistent path into the WordPress ecosystem while helping local communities build stronger connections with the next generation of contributors.
Students showcasing a website they built during a club session
When WordPress Campus Connect workshops first began reaching universities, the goal was straightforward: help students discover WordPress, understand the value of open source, and see that contribution can be part of their learning journey. In many cases, that first introduction created immediate interest. Students who had never worked with WordPress before started asking questions, exploring what the software could do, and showing curiosity about the wider community.
That early response also revealed a gap. A workshop could spark interest, but it could not always sustain it on its own. Encouraging students to attend local WordPress meetups helped extend that first connection and, in some cases, brought new energy to existing local communities. Even so, it became clear that campuses needed something more consistent and closer to students’ everyday environment.
WordPress Student Clubs emerged from that need. Instead of limiting engagement to a single event, these clubs create an ongoing, student-led presence on campus where students can keep learning, share knowledge with peers, and grow more confident over time. They also offer a practical bridge between first exposure and deeper participation, helping students move from curiosity to contribution through regular activity and community support.
Learning What Sustains Participation
As WordPress Student Clubs started forming across campuses, the early enthusiasm was encouraging, but sustaining that momentum proved to be one of the first real challenges. Student Club Organizers shared that interest was often strongest at the beginning, especially after a workshop or an introductory session, but turning that interest into regular participation required patience and experimentation. Like many community efforts, the clubs needed time to find a rhythm that worked for the students involved.
One of the most common challenges was consistency. Many students were interested in learning WordPress, but regular engagement depended on more than initial curiosity. Organizers found that participation grew more steadily when activities felt approachable and useful, especially when students could learn by doing rather than only listening. Small learning sessions, collaborative exercises, and hands-on activities often made it easier for students to return and take part again.
Organizers also noticed that some students were initially hesitant to engage actively. Asking questions, speaking up in a group, or volunteering to help lead a session did not always happen naturally. Building a club meant creating an environment where students felt comfortable enough to participate, try something new, and gradually take ownership of their own learning.
Academic schedules added another layer of complexity. Because the clubs are student-led, planning around classes, assignments, and exams required flexibility. Keeping activities regular without overwhelming organizers or participants meant working within the rhythms of campus life. Those early difficulties became part of the learning process and helped shape how the clubs began to operate more effectively.
Building Through Small, Consistent Activities
As organizers worked through those challenges, certain approaches began to show results. Instead of focusing on large events, many clubs found momentum through simple, repeatable activities that students could join without feeling intimidated. Regular learning sessions, small hands-on workshops, and peer-to-peer discussions helped create an environment that felt both welcoming and practical.
A Student club activity in a college led by a student club Organizer
Students showcasing websites built during a club session
That steady approach mattered. When students could return to familiar formats and see progress from one session to the next, clubs became easier to sustain. Organizers were able to build routines, and participants could join at their own pace. Over time, those small efforts started to strengthen participation more effectively than occasional large events.
Student ownership also played an important role. As students began sharing what they had learned, helping their peers, and taking part in running sessions, engagement started to grow more organically. These moments helped shift the clubs from being simply learning spaces to becoming communities in their own right. Students were not only using WordPress in a classroom context. They were also beginning to understand it as part of a collaborative open source project shaped by people who learn together, build together, and support one another.
Guidance from the local WordPress community helped reinforce that progress. Although the clubs are student-led, organizers benefited from having experienced community members available as mentors. Mentors helped them think through session structure, activity planning, and the practical challenge of staying motivated while balancing academic responsibilities. That kind of support gave organizers more confidence to experiment and keep building.
Mentorship also connected campus activity to the broader WordPress ecosystem. Students were not learning in isolation. Through local community guidance, they were able to see how meetups, contributions, and collaboration all fit into a larger network of people who have been participating in WordPress for years. That connection gave the work happening on campus greater meaning and helped students see a clearer path forward.
Early Impact Across Campuses
Although WordPress Student Clubs are still in an early stage, signs of impact are already visible. Organizers have shared that more students are showing interest in learning WordPress and in exploring what open source participation can look like in practice. In several cases, students who first joined as learners are now contributing to discussions, helping peers during sessions, and organizing club activities themselves.
That shift from passive participation to active involvement is one of the clearest signs of growth. It suggests that the clubs are beginning to create more than awareness. They are creating opportunities for students to build confidence, practice leadership, and develop a stronger sense of connection to the WordPress community. Even at this stage, that kind of change points to the long-term value of sustaining engagement on campus.
One encouraging example came during the International Women’s Day celebration in Ajmer, India, where students participated alongside members of the local WordPress community. Organizers noted that the event included 100 female attendees, with around 50% of participants coming from student clubs. For many of those students, it was a first opportunity to take part in a broader community event, meet other contributors, and see how open source communities collaborate in practice.
Women’s Day Ajmer 2026 Event, where more than 50% participation from student clubs
Experiences like that show how student-led initiatives can extend beyond campus and begin contributing to the wider community. They also create space for new voices to participate. As students move from club sessions into local events, they gain experience not only as learners but also as community members who can help shape what comes next.
The clubs are also creating leadership opportunities on campus. Organizers have stepped into new roles by coordinating activities, encouraging participation, and maintaining momentum over time. Those experiences help students build skills that matter both within the WordPress community and beyond it, including communication, organization, and problem-solving.
“Being a Student Club Organizer helped me improve my leadership and communication skills.” — Sanjeevni Kumari, WordPress Student Club Organizer, Mahila Engineering College, Ajmer
Looking Ahead
WordPress Student Clubs are still developing, but the journey so far points to a promising direction. What began as an effort to sustain interest after WordPress Campus Connect is gradually becoming a more durable model for ongoing learning and collaboration on campus. The clubs are helping students stay connected to WordPress beyond a first introduction, while also creating stronger links between educational spaces and local communities.
That longer-term potential is one reason this work matters. With regular campus activity and continued mentorship, Student Clubs can help create a stronger foundation for future contributors. They can also help students build confidence before attending local meetups, contributing to community efforts, or participating in events beyond their campuses.
“With regular on-campus activities through WordPress Student Clubs, the real impact may become visible over the next couple of years, as a stronger WordPress ecosystem begins to take shape within campuses.” — Anand Upadhyay, Student Club Mentor
As more students get involved and take ownership of these spaces, WordPress Student Clubs can continue to open pathways to learning, leadership, and community participation. For campuses, they offer a way to keep the momentum going after Campus Connect. For the broader project, they represent another step toward welcoming more students into the WordPress open source ecosystem. To follow this work and explore how it connects with the wider community, readers can look to WordPress Campus Connect, WordPress Meetups, and other education and community initiatives across WordPress.org.
Growing up in the 80s, the answer was obvious. A hero was the figure who strode across cinema screens with fire in their eyes, the angry young man who fought the system with bare fists, who spoke truth to power and packed off the villains. Bold, loud, very gendered. The archetype was clear: stand with the people, defy authority, be ruthlessly honest, and win.
· · ·
In 2015, a message arrived in my WordPress Slack. The opener was disarmingly direct:
“Hi, there. Do you know who I am?”
I replied, honestly: “Nope.”
“Rock on! I hope to change that. My name is Topher, and I am working on a cool WordPress project!”
That project was HeroPress. And just like that, Topher pulled me into an orbit I have never quite left. The orbit of planet HeroPress.
I always figured HeroPress as an archive, a living oral history of ordinary people and their relationships with WordPress. A catalog of people and their journeys through anxieties, migrations from smaller to larger worlds, their small and big wins.
By 2015, I was not any sort of angry young man. I was not raging against any machine. What possible heroism could I claim?
But Topher has always understood something more nuanced than the cinematic archetype: that the first act of speaking for others is learning how to speak for yourself. Telling your story as worthy of an audience was the first important step.
HeroPress was built on that belief. He gave people a platform and declined to editorialise. He let each voice arrive in its own register, its own cadence, its own dialect of living that story. Then he called the essayists a hero and meant it!
South Asia took to this immediately. A remarkable number of the earliest essays came from India. Topher celebrated each of them. He did not curate them into a brand. He simply made room. He also travelled to India once. The only time I met him.
Over the years that followed, Topher and I became friends in the way that only the internet makes possible and only genuine curiosity sustains. We have talked and laughed about politics, faith or lack of it, books, old computers, films, and the particular texture of a very slow dial-up internet. We became friends across seven seas.
But the thing I have heard most often from others is not about his wit or his enthusiasm, though both are abundant. It is something quieter.
Dozens of people from across the WordPress world, from India, from other countries Topher has likely never visited, have told me that when they were lost, when they were searching for a job or weathering a personal catastrophe or simply trying to find their footing, Topher had time for them. He listened. He did not solve everything. He just showed up and walked with them.
If WordPress were a world unto itself, conjured by a Tolkien-like imagination, Topher would be a great axe-wielding dwarf who simply walked with you for a while, just to make sure you were alright.
· · ·
Two weeks ago, I co-led WordCamp Asia in Mumbai. It was one of the largest WordPress conferences ever assembled. People I had not seen in years showed up. Stories entwined together in corridors and over at the coffee and tea counters. I met several people who missed Topher being around. Several dozens of us who have written on HeroPress their stories, and several dozens more who will write them in the future.
I stood on the stage and felt the weight of an open source community that had shaped the past decade of my life.
I thought of Topher more than once. Thought how much he would have loved being in Mumbai. I missed his presence in the particular way you miss someone whose absence you notice in the middle of a moment of joy.
A few days later, Topher checked in. Asked how WordCamp Asia had gone. Asked how I had felt about it. Then, almost as an afterthought, he asked whether I would write the 300th essay for HeroPress.
Three hundred, is a number with some weight, a milestone of this great project. An essay Topher should have written himself, looking back at a decade of great conversations and the people he came across. But Topher1Kenobe’s way, that is not!
He deflects the spotlight and so he handed this number to me, and I accepted. Because Topher is persuasive.
I am no longer the child who measured heroism by the arc of a punch. A hero is someone who shows up when someone needs you to, to listen without agenda, to celebrate people as they are rather than as you wish they were.
Topher has been doing this for a decade. Three hundred stories. Thousands of conversations and dozens upon dozens of friends.
So if you are reading this essay, let’s raise a toast to Topher DeRosia, the Hero of HeroPress, the axe yielding dwarf who walks beside you, the friend who checks in, the man who has made more heroes than he will ever count or take credit for. He has a story.
He has hundreds of them. And every single one belongs to someone else but now also to him, which is fantastic!
In this episode, hosts Bob Dunn and Cami McNamara discuss WellPlayedWP, a unique subscription service for WordPress plugins launched by Marcus Burnette. The service focuses on innovative, user-driven plugin development, addressing gaps in existing solutions.
The social web's success stems from standards and protocols like WebFinger and OAuth, which foster ownership, interoperability, and innovation, surpassing the temporary impact of individual platforms.
In this 130th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack is joined by Tammie Lister to discuss the latest developments in WordPress, Gutenberg, and the broader ecosystem. The conversation opens with Tammie sharing insights from her new role at Convesio, where she works on product collaboration within hosting and payments.
The episode highlights Tammie’s upcoming WordCamp Europe talk, focusing on the concept of “human in the loop” with AI. She emphasizes the importance of integrating humanity into AI processes, ensuring that humans are involved throughout, not just at the beginning or end. Both speakers reflect on how AI empowers learning and creativity, with Tammy sharing personal stories about using AI for education and art.
A significant portion is devoted to the anticipated release of WordPress 7.0, which was delayed to accommodate more thorough testing for real-time collaboration features, especially in less powerful hosting environments. Birgit Pauli-Haack and Tammie commend the community for developing a comprehensive testing suite and discuss the challenges and importance of performance, infrastructure, and backward compatibility.
Other highlights include community plugin updates, especially around AI, collaborative editing with Claude by Gary Pendergast, and the growing list of AI providers and skills for WordPress. The duo reviews notable Gutenberg plugin updates (22.9 and 23.0), exploring enhancements such as improvements to the UI component packages, block library features, command palette, and upcoming media editing tools.
The episode wraps up with excitement about continued innovation, the empowerment AI brings to different skill levels, and the ongoing evolution of WordPress as a robust content management and collaboration platform.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 130th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordPress 7.0, Gutenberg 22.9 and 23.0 WordCamp Europe and block themes and so much more. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full core contributor at the WordPress Open Source project sponsored by Automattic. And with me on the show is my longtime friend and regular guest Tammie Lister. And she’s a core committer, chief product officer at Convesio and was the co-lead of the first phase of Gutenberg. Tammie, it’s wonderful to have you in on the show.
Tammie Lister: I’m so pleased to be here.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you. Thank you for the time. So how are you today?
Tammie Lister: I’m great, thank you. How are you?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m good, I’m good. You started a new job. So what are you working on in your new position?
Tammie Lister: I’m incredibly lucky that I get to facilitate and collaborate on products within Convesio hosting, and we’re working on a range of different things. We work on both hosting and payments along with some other products. And I’m really excited to be able to do that and kind of grow with that team.
WordCamp Europe
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s wonderful. Wonderful. Yeah. Well, congratulations. So. And you are also a speaker at WordCamp Europe. Your title is Human in the Loop means something and we probably learn what it means.
Tammie Lister: Yeah. So we always kind of had this idea with AI that the human in the loop, maybe it’s just like the prompting that you start with doing and you’re like at the start of the being the human in the loop. And I think as kind of we’re learning to be with AI and we’re learning to see AI as more of integrated. My talk is about how when we use the term human in a loop and I think kind of people just drop it now into product making processes and they drop it into anything that they’re doing. It should be various points in that loop, should be where humans are not just at the start and then having something kind of chucked out of them by AI just produced. That’s not the human being actually in the loop. That’s the human being at the beginning and the end of the loop. Rather than being integrated. That’s kind of the one angle of it and the other is that AI really needs to kind of be integrated in our lives. It already is, but it actually needs to be integrated, not just forced and therefore it needs to learn to kind of integrate with us and it needs to learn to be with us. There are various technologies that are doing that and in that talk I’m going to kind of explore how that happens and how that happens from a product perspective as well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, well, that’s going to be really interesting because I, what I, my experience is more like the, all of a sudden the humans become the bottleneck and then some programmers try to work around that and say, okay, we need to get AI, be smarter, but you…
Tammie Lister: still do the opposite. I think if we take the best of humans and combine it with the best of AI, we have the best future.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think so too. Yeah. Because humanity is all that’s left. Right. And that needs to serve that.
Tammie Lister: And if we don’t have AI with that splash of humanity, one where some of us aren’t going to use it and we, we can evangelize as much for people to use it as possible, but people are going to have a bit of reaction to it and also it’s, it’s going to be kind of that friction when we do use it and going to be like talking to kind of a calculator or a fridge all the time. It’s not going to kind of. And I’m not talking about giving it a cute name or making it kind of that or anthem performance. I can never say that word, that word. That’s not what I’m talking about, talking about and talking about just being able to have a splash of humanity with it and, and how that AI can learn from us as much as we can learn from AI.
And we also, it’s that augmentation as part of it. So I think we’re all learning about how AI can be used both in part of our process as well and how it can make us better at what we do. And you know, there’s this kind of 10x all these kind of things. I think that’s quite a flippant thing because that’s like, well no, we were doing the best we could do before. It just means that we now have the abilities through doing this. So yeah, I’m kind of forming it at the moment and it’s going in lots of different angles and I’ve got to kind of try and take it in one straight angle. But I know for me and many other people, AI in particular the last year it’s been very empowering both from the work that they do and in the kind of personal life. So hopefully there’ll be some take home on things you can use as much as kind of sharing the maybe a more optimistic future perspective.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah I feel the same way. I feel totally empowered to. Yeah. To submit PRs, create more documentation and all that and. And also for writing. Yeah. With English as a second language it’s so much richer when you learn from. From AI to kind of different angles and all that. So it’s a. It’s a really interesting.
Tammie Lister: The point you said about learn from and I think that that’s something really important that we can learn from AI and sometimes we. I cannot remember. I was actually found an article I cannot remember again but there was an article about like it being unlocking education for people. And I know there’s like different conversations about where that is and where your sources are for that, but it actually can like the things that I have learned and the things that I have been able to expand my knowledge base with because I now have access to it that I didn’t have access research PA different things. I’ve been able to. I have one of these things I use in my open claw that’s called Explain this. It’s a skill but it explains it how I understand it. As for me which is a very unique way that I understand things. But it will say it like that. Then it will relate to the job I do. Then it will lead to the areas of interest that I have and I’ve refined that skill to talk to me. Not many people nobody else can do that and I hadn’t got that before so been able to do that and give it things initially do that and then help me break things down has been really really, really important to me.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah that’s the most. The application that I use it most is actually to learn things .
Tammie Lister: Explain this as I would understand this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I. I had on my flight to. So I was in Costa Rica and I was on a flight that didn’t have any WI fi and But I still was able to. To take my laptop and open it up and ask a question because I had Olama installed and I had one of the. One of the LLMs there and I learned about Transformers and all that and you can actually ask it to explain it to me like I’m a five year old. And then it gets further and further. There is a whole education school out there that wants the kids to go and learn for themselves and not in a. In a complete setting. I think I would thrive in that because I could they had yeah. Dive deeper into topics that I’m interested in and never Come out. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: I think even, even for me from personal, like creating art with it, doing all these kind of different things like it has been to me. Yeah. So I’m hoping like I’m still forming my talk because I’m a bit of a last minute in that sense. It’s not that last minute, but yeah, five weeks, right? Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You always do your own pictures, right?
Tammie Lister: Well, I may not. I don’t know.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You may not.
Tammie Lister: I’m curious about could, could I get AI to create like me? That’s something I’m exploring because it feels like it might be right if it took my pictures. If it took. I don’t know. I have not decided yet on that angle. So more to come on that I’ve been exploring how AI can take my art as a source. I already paint with AI what AI creates. I paint that. So the full circle might be that AI creates from my artwork.
All right, so let’s dive back to WordPress. We have a few announcements. One, the biggest one is last time we talked here on the podcast WordPress 7.0 still had was scheduled for April 9th. That obviously didn’t happen. And before we get into more details here, the good news, we have a new release date and updated information about WordPress 7.0. May 20th is the latest date. And I also put in the show notes the post that kind of announced that beta release candidate cycle resumes with the next release party that’s scheduled for May 8th at 1500 UTC. And then that kind of starts I think it’s two releases that are quasi beta and then two releases that are quasi release candidates. And also in that discussion, there’s also a discussion that the RTC performance testing script that automatically tests for possible architecture approaches for hostings is about to be released and I’ll share the link to the repository. Dorin, not everybody would need that, mostly hostings. But that was also the reason why things got a little bit delayed. So Tammie, I’m going to try to explain this, how I understood it and the reasoning behind it and you can correct me and elaborate what you feel is important.
So if I understood it correctly, the delay was actually requested by Matt, but in coordination with core committers and the hosting team, because WordPress 7.0’s main feature is a real time collaboration project, and collaborators worked on it for over a year and the goal was to get it into best shape in what it can be for the first release. But it had been a whole wide testing done but it was only on enterprise infrastructure. So with the inclusion into core it also needs to work in less powerful hosting environments and hosting companies didn’t have enough time or tools to actually test it. So during the release cycle there was this feedback that they needed more time and test the feature more so they can enable it for many, many clients. They couldn’t they needed to switch it off and that was not the purpose of that. It should be a wide enough application. So the team created a test suite for the hosting companies and also published a death note on how to create an external provider for this offloading of the resource heavy sync process. Because that’s all of a sudden you have not one person on the. On the screen, you have five maybe. And that increases stuff. Yeah. So that’s my understanding.
Tammie Lister: Correct, it was also not necessarily the delay, but there were also kinds of pieces of it table and kind of all right, the pieces were kind of needed to be done or. Or were done and kind of like that. That has implications. I think the too long don’t read is real time collab is complicated. Real time collab is very complicated from an infrastructure perspective and we need to have thorough testing across every implementation. And one of the things which when you think about it, it’s for humans to do real time collaboration. But actually one of the most interesting things is not humans doing real time collaboration.
And actually now we have the testing suite we can actually test with not humans doing it. That’s why I’m kind of fascinated to do some of this testing and that can be even more load bearing. So if you think about like someone like I think one of the cases was like if it’s on a small hosting I only have one person. Well not if that one person gets very excited about agents because that person could have suddenly lots of agents even though their own like a tiny little bit of hosting and they’re not enterprise. They could have made themselves enterprise and they couldn’t have made themselves into that situation just by being at the forward of like agentic work. So we had that balance like on in 7.0 we’re promoting be forward with AI. Agentic is like a word. You might as well like to take a sip of tea every time you hit the word agentic. I don’t think alcohol would be super tissue.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, what a thinking game.
Tammie Lister: I’d be tea drunk. I really would. But it. So people are going to want to push and test it. Right. So I think it is. I would much rather people were cautious with something that someone that works in hosting that would bring down hosting. But I think it is hard for everybody involved when we have to pause a release, when we have to say oops, we’re not doing it now. And oops is one way but hey, we’re not doing it now kind of help. It’s hard. People do not do this lightly. They do not say we’re not going to do release lightly. So, you know, yeah, there’s a lot to be kind of thought about that having been involved with one of the longest ones that was stopped before. It’s a lot for humans to have that. I love that we have a testing suite now. I love that we can have that. This feature is going to potentially in 7.1 and in the patches and in the point release afterwards. And I don’t want to be a doomsayer, but we’re going to have to adjust it, we’re going to have to perform it, we’re going to have to get that feedback. So it needs to be the best bet to go live with and then we need to take it from there. So. But this is now it’s in the best shape it could be, so it can kind of go from there.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah, yeah. And you just mentioned that there’s also for the updates and coordination, there’s an. There will be an extra table added to WordPress as well to manage that polling and the intermediate storage of things.
Tammie Lister: That’s not a light thing to do that. That is like, like I, I said it very flippantly, but it’s not a flippant thing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no. And there needs to be really thought process in there because it’s gonna be in WordPress for the next 20 years.
Tammie Lister: That’s like building something to the house, right?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So you cannot just tear it down because you don’t like it anymore.
Tammie Lister: No, that’s. That’s definitely.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: People build on it. Yeah. Yes. So May 20th is the next release date and whoever hasn’t tested their plugins and themes with a you get another. Almost a month of grace. Time to do it now. Yeah, don’t wait. Do it now. Sometimes I say don’t wait. Procrastinate now. But this is not the case here. No.
Tammie Lister: And I think you really, if you don’t ever test your plugins on ever releases, test them on this one. Not just because of editing, but also because of the admin interface changes as well. Not changes in a big way, just in a. Just enough that maybe do some testing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there’s Also the minimum PHP version is changed to 7.4. Have a bit of a look. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Just spend half an hour.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. See if it blows up or not. Yeah. And there’s only a late addition to the developer notes. The roster of design tools per block that have been since 6.7 I think it’s now updated to version WebPR 7.0. And one of my next projects is that I create. Create a plugin that actually has a few more table block features. So it doesn’t. Is so yeah rudimentary anymore but especially the sticky header when you have 90 rows in a table. Yeah, that would be really helpful.
Tammie Lister: Yeah I love that because the table block to me is one that I always end up having to do custom work on or I have to do it. If anything in my work is going to take whenever I’m doing don’t always do sites but whenever I do do sites if there’s anything comparison tables such a common thing we end up doing. Right. Like or even if you’re going to do like pricing or comparison whatever you’re going to do at most sites at some point if they’re a SaaS or if they’re a product based they’re going to have something like that on. You always have to do something with CSS on there or even down to like how you put image. Putting images inside there and it’s a bit nickety and all those kind of ways.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s all. Yeah there are some projects out there that I probably won’t tackle but it’s the sticky header and then that you can. The first column can be styled differently than the rest of it and then also have a sticky first column so when you horizontally scroll that you still have the lines in there and merge and unmerge for cells because that really helps. So. But I will see how far it gets. I submitted it to the first version slightly version tiny version to the blog repository and there are 763 ahead of me. So it probably takes two to three weeks. That’s fine with me. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: But I mean that’s a pretty good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Compared to three months before, you know. Five months or six months. Yeah. So I’m. I’m not worried about that. And it’s gonna be on GitHub anyway.
Community Contributions
So. Yeah, there are other contributions, community contributions. One. I just wanted to let you know that if you have subscribed to the Gutenberg Times weekly edition, you know about that. But it’s the. I have published my workshop resources from the Building a block theme from scratch from WordCamp Asia. And it has all the resources that you need. You have the kind of a little slide deck, but it also has a reference theme and then content that you can put into your studio. Has instructions how to set up WordPress Studio or use Playground and then step by step instructions how to rebuild the theme with the site editor and not touch code. So see how far you get if you want to learn that. But you should be able to do this within an hour or two or three. But you need some familiarity with the site editor, definitely. And the Create block theme plugin. And so that’s for you in the show notes. The next one is maybe you can talk about it. Claudia Borative Collaborative editing with Claude by Gary Pendergast here has a new plugin. Yeah, yeah.
Tammie Lister: So apparently it’s twice the fun. So it’s kind of what I was saying about like clap of editing is great, but one of the things I think a lot of people have been thinking of is like, oh, yes, so that’s humans. No, no, no.
Tammie Lister: What if it could be agents? And this is really worth checking out to have a look at that. Gary is a long time. Is a core committer. Long time worked on. Gutenberg works on in Automattic. So he’s. He’s definitely got the experience to work on it and he’s definitely kind of brewed this up. Super excited about it. It is Claude only at the moment. I think there’s plans to kind of make it a little bit kind of expansive there. Maybe that dropped last night. It’s work in progress and it’s been worked on, so I love that. But to me, this is where I get a bit more excited as someone that’s already trained my. It’s a me problem, but I’ve already trained my open Claude to write like me. Not that it’s going to just write without me being a human in the loop, but because of that, me being able to collaborate with. I call it Exo. With Exo, it means that I can have that conversation, that I can do it within WordPress, which is really powerful for me. I. I do it in Obsidian at the moment. I have been able to take that in and do it in that environment. I was doing something before this plugin.
I was kind of doing like a. A faked version. I had. There was a UK children show called City show and bear with me on this. And I ended up with the characters like doing agent work together just to test collaborative editing for myself because I wanted to see if it could be done and it’s pretty effective to be able to have agents talking to each other and testing. So it is a really good experience. Maybe you’ve got one. Again, it doesn’t have to be that you are as a human doing it. Maybe you have an agent that is looking at your grammar. Maybe you have an agent that is specializing in images. Maybe have a. So you can have agents that are specializing in different things or you can even have someone else’s agent come and do different things for SEO or different. Different stuff. So I think that’s the thing. Like if you are enterprise, you probably have agents that work across the company that do very specialist skills and then you could have them come into the editor. So projects like this are really interesting for that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s absolutely fascinating, the whole thing. Yeah. And if you really want to go really, really deep in AI across the.
Tammie Lister: You need snacks for this post.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So there is a James LePage who is the head of AI at Automattic, but also the team rep or team lead for the core AI team. He has put together a blog post with. I haven’t counted it, but I’m thinking more than 70 or 80 links about anything and everything that’s done with AI in the WordPress ecosystem from the community AI providers. So WordPress 7 has this connector page where there are three AI providers by default that you can install. But the community also came very fast up with the providers for other LLMs like Mistral for Europe or Open Router provider or Olama provider or Alibaba. So you get a link for all those. Those will not be displayed in default, but once you install the plugin you can connect them to the things and then a lot of plugins that have already implemented the Abilities API. Yeah. From ACF to Jetpack to Fluid Design System for Elementor, Divi, WP and main WP maintenance kind of dashboard. They all come up with mcps. So you can connect your agents with them if you want to. You totally can ignore that segment on the podcast if you’re not interested. Agent skills. They’re not only the WordPress agent skills, but others have also automatic, for instance, published agent skills.
Tammie Lister: Or those skills are invaluable. I’m just gonna say. Yeah, those skills are absolutely. They should be required in any work.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: that you’re doing, right? Yeah, I don’t do any. Anything WordPress development without those agents. Yeah, they’re definitely required reading for your LLMs, your coding agents. Yeah. And then infrastructure agency, Enterprise Adoption Community. So It’s a really long. And I’m going back to that post multiple times in the last two weeks since. Since it was published. So I wanted everybody to know about that too. Yeah, that’s it. Any thoughts for now or would I forgot.
Tammie Lister: Love going there and seeing all the amazing stuff people are building as well, which I think is really important. And to think this is the list today and that list is only going to get bigger.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think after the last two weeks, the. Since it was published, a lot of things already happened. So I’m kind of thinking it’s the same for me. It’s the same situation like it was when Gutenberg was introduced and I was kind of putting the Gutenberg times together. I’m kind of. Oh, I need to kind of.
Tammie Lister: Yeah. Which is I. I love that problem.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, totally.
Tammie Lister: We are being creative and we are creating cool stuff.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m really amazed by how, how people come up with things and how you work with it, how my co workers work with it, how I explore.
Tammie Lister: Enabling people to have ideas that they, the ideas have sat in their brains or they haven’t been capable of doing this. It’s not so they, they haven’t had the either the language to like the skill language to do. It’s not that they’re not capable, is it that they haven’t had the knowledge to do it right. Everybody is super capable. It’s just empowered them to be able to do it for themselves. Maybe they were a designer, now they can do development, but the developer, now they can do some more designer stuff and then also pairing up with people. I’ve seen a lot of that where people be going like, okay, well this has enabled us to collaborate easier and faster as well. So you don’t just have to be isolated on your own, just talking to a group of agents, which is kind of sad if you only do that. But that’s okay. That’s my life. But you know, actually collaborating with people who are also doing this stuff, like the buzz like that you can get from that is really like I went to Cloud Fest a month ago now and just talking with people about this stuff again, getting that kind of vibe about, oh well, here’s the stuff that I use or here’s the stuff that I use where like an instantly you level up your stack, and you level up what you’re doing and come away with some cool ideas. So every week I talk to someone about this, I come up with a ridiculously long list of tools of cool stuff to try out or I see posts like this, I’m like, okay, well now. And one thing I do, I share the bookmarks. So I’m kind of like getting those bookmarks reminded me so I can be like, okay, well now I kind of pull these out and then I explore those bookmarks. You can even give it to your agent and have a look at your bookmarks with your agent. You really want to do that? Just saying.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I talk with my husband about it every day. He. He kind of discovered the. Because his company is kind of using Codex and I’m using more clothes so we kind of can combine it. And now I have found a plugin for Claude for Codex. So I’m kind of your interception is there? Yeah, like the. The movie is kind of where your brain kind of clicks a little bit and then you kind of. Okay, moving on. But yeah, his work is totally different than what I do. But we are using the tools that are there and it’s quite an interesting conversation every time.
Tammie Lister: Yeah, great space to be working in.
What’s Released – Gutenberg 22.9
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. So now we come to the section of what’s released and we have two Gutenberg plugin releases to talk about. One was 22.9 that was released on April 8th and it has a few things. Many of them were actually for the real time collaboration and some of the bug fixes are still there. But yeah, there’s also a lot of work being done in the component space.
Enhancements
And the WordPress UI package is actually has some empty states for the components and displaying some placeholders content when sections have no data and all that. So that is actually throughout the whole WordPress UI package and interesting for developers who use it. The same with the alert dialogue primitive that you can tab into. And there are a lot of other good things in there. Check out the Storybook for the UI packages. Are you working with those packages?
Tammie Lister: Yeah, to me it’s a general nudge. I think a lot of. So one of the experiences I’ve seen with plugin developers at the moment, not just in the work I do, but in general talking at cloudfest or otherwise, is those that maybe hadn’t used it before now actually we’re talking about like with agentic coding because of the skills and because of the ease that they can point to the skills and there actually is one, they’re starting to be able to use them way more. It’s not no longer a case of go to Storybook, click on a component, be able to pull and then work out from the pace between Figma and that was actually like it seemed easy, but it was quite a gap for people to function in.
And because you can actually use the skill and then you can be like. So one of the plugins I love is Superpowers. It’s a plugin that allows you to do brainstorming. I love brainstorming with the bots. And so I can just be like, okay, this is what I want to do. And now tell me before you do it. I’m a bit of a control freak that way. And then it can kind of come back, but it will. These are the skills I want you to use. Tell me what components you’re going to use. Look at this repo. And you can literally be like, so for me, here’s my. Here’s my dusty plugin. Can you look at my desk? I’m calling my plugin dusty. Can you look at my dusty plugin? Can you come up with my plan of how I would fit these into the dusty plugin that I’ve made? And I’ve done this, some of my older stuff and it’s been like, okay, yes, here’s the newer components that you could do. And I’m like, well, thanks. And it will be able to parse it, come out of a plan. Then you work with it. And that’s. It’s pretty. Very impressive that it can do that and it can pick it. So I think leaning into that being your guide and if you say stay true to. So say like, what is the native use of tabs? What is the native use of these components? It gets it really well. So.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s how I approach it too, you know, to kind of point it to the repos and see if you, you don’t have to come up with things. Yeah, it’s kind of.
Tammie Lister: Yeah, yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that’s also for. For plugin developers who have their own interfaces. Yeah. That they have to maintain.
Tammie Lister: Yeah. You can get rid of like 80% of your interface that you don’t have to maintain. And to a good point, to that often people think, okay, well, it means that I therefore don’t have any personality or I don’t have any style or I don’t have anything. No, no, no. What you can do is you can bring the buttons in. I’m a little bit of a purist about I still want the primary button to be the primary button and I don’t want to like a secondary and all those kinds of things. But you can bring styling into it. You can bring graphics, you can bring headers, you can bring different tonal stuff into it. But just if everybody knows what a primary button is in WordPress, no matter what plugin they’re using, that is fantastic because it’s also already tested by Accessibility Team. If it’s updated, it’s updated for everybody, which is amazing. And yeah, it’s so much easier going forward. And it’s responsive out of the box.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s definitely easier for the user. They don’t have to learn a new interface for every plugin. And if they have.
Tammie Lister: Now it’s. Now it’s to this, to the right side, now it’s to the bottom, now it’s to the. No, it’s always. Tabs are here and I think just stabilizing the interface to that. Once we stabilize every experience, we can do some wacky stuff, we can bring some awesome graphics, we can bring some personality back to it, but we have the experience being the same and I think we have to separate maybe the experience from the visual art. And if we do that, we have a thing that works really well, but also is really shockingly beautiful as well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah. So in the block library we have some additional features. One is that the black ground gradient support can now be combined with the background images. So that’s really cool because then you have an overlay and you can have this really shiny designs there. I love that.
Tammie Lister: Now that seems like that’s a kind of small thing just there. But honestly, that’s a major thing for theme design, being able to have that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there is an experimental forms block and if you haven’t tried it yet,you need to open and open up the Gutenberg Plugin Experiments page and check it. But it now also supports hidden fields and that makes it much more feasible to be used in form if you want to put your forms together. And I don’t know if you can. I need to play around with it some more. I haven’t yet. But what happens with the action and where does it go is definitely something that I need to figure out there. Because that’s the biggest part on form plugins that you can. Where does the data go? Yeah. So what else do we have?
Tammie Lister: Commands. I think we go down to the command block, don’t we? Oh, command palette. I see blocks everywhere. Apparently. So on the command palette we have that we add sections to Command palette and introduce recently used functionality. This is such a quality of life.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Especially when you can get more commands in, you never find it. So the search is really important.
Tammie Lister: This is interesting because I never used to use this. Sorry, confession time. I never used to use this, but I use it all the time now. It’s weird. I think I use it all the time because I use it all the time now on Mac. It is strange and I think it’s just like I now expect everything to have it. It’s. It’s a weird thing. So. Yeah, it makes a lot of functionality to me. Like when it first happened, I was like, nice feature.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I don’t use it. Yeah. But I think I wasn’t going to use it.
Tammie Lister: It was more like. I used to feel that way about voice chat. I’m. I take sometimes some features. I weirdly being that’s my thing, I take a little bit of time to warm up to. But this one I did, I definitely could see the use, but now I. It’s part of my workflow and I can definitely see, like, I find that I know how to hit it and I will hit it and I will use it, so. And I want it in everything now. So.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nice. Yeah. Just a way of caution. You need to enable that in the experiments page as well. There’s a workflow palette experiment, one of those. It’s getting longer and longer. I still need to write that post that explains all those experiments because there’s no documentation. So. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Somehow they’re kind of hidden down the back.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, they’re hidden because they’re waiting for feedback. But you can’t give any feedback when you don’t know how it works. So it’s all a little bit circular.
Tammie Lister: Excursion is features.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. And even the description is like. What does that even mean? Yeah. So. And. And then we go down to the experiments in the changelog and the Post Editor is an experiment for. To look like the Page Editor in the Site Editor. And now it also has some field. Yeah. For excerpts and sticky and. And all that revision.
Tammie Lister: Full fleshed addition to it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I have found that certain things don’t work in the Post Editor, but they only work in the Site Editor. So bringing in the Post Editor to the Site Editor would help with some of those features. So there’s another experiment that we talked a little bit about, the previous release, because it came into 22.8. That’s the experimental guidelines. They were called content guidelines. Now they’re only guidelines because it’s clear it’s content and they have been refactored and improved with Typescript. I just wanted to point that out. That’s something that you. When you have agents coming to your website, you can guide them through your guidelines on how. What to do with it and what not to do and all that. So it’s a really good interface to look at. Well, there are a lot of PRs in here, but I think the next one that I want to point out is Gutenberg 23.0.
Gutenberg 23.0
Tammie Lister: Two versions of one.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: One done. And that was only released this week. We are recording this on February of February we’re recording this.
Tammie Lister: I’m not doing March again.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No March. We are jumping right into April and it’s April 24th. We are recording this. And Gutenberg 23.0 was released on April 22nd. Again. A lot of components updates for WordPress, the UI, they’re really hopping on that. It’s phenomenal.
Tammie Lister: And honestly, I’m just gonna say that is needed. If you’re building stuff, you’re building applications or we’ve been talking about like themes. The theme of this is have fun, build stuff, do things. This is what we need. We need this interface to be our LEGO kit to be able to do that. That’s something like I have way too long a list of things I want to play with and me and Exo are going to have some fun time with all these components. So that’s exactly what people are doing. And the more these components we have, the more fun people can have building. And that’s. That’s the cool thing about this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, No, I definitely let my AI soon because I’m building a plugin. Right.
Enhancements
But anyway, so in the block library, there’s one thing to point out that I selected was that the search block has a fix now and the color settings actually apply also to the input fields when the button is disabled. Because sometimes you don’t need a button, but you need the color settings to persist. The tabs block got a few changes. It was actually refactored from the previous version. That’s why it didn’t make it to WordPress 7.0. So contributors are really working on it to get it ready for 7.1. Yeah, we definitely have some more when it gets to. Out of experiment.
Tammie Lister: Very wanted block.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a wanted block for everybody. Yeah, or change them. And Here is the. In 23.0 was the name change from the Guidelines Experiments component to. From content guidelines to Guidelines. And it’s out of experimentation.
Tammie Lister: Shortcuts for moving blocks via tool tips. Maybe you can explain this one. I don’t think I’ve kind of seen this one in Block Editor.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the space shortcuts for moving Blocks via tool tips. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Oh, okay. That’s kind of cool. So it’s actually just kind of visualizing the shortcuts, which is really good. So you actually get the shortcuts rather than having to bring up the shortcut panel. Oh, okay. That’s super good. So I kind of didn’t see that one. I love that. I love finding sneak surprises of cool stuff. I’m just saying, like that is also the cool thing about all these releases. Sometimes you find one that’s pretty cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And they’re buried through all the technology one. Yeah. Yeah. So I was at, in. At the meetup in Salzburg and this week and it’s only an hour and a half from here with. With a train. I love going by train. So I did some work. One of the features that people are really talk to or kind of that talk to them is actually the columns block in a paragraph. What’s in 7.0 where you can just highlight the paragraph block and then say give me columns and then you can put it in two columns. And that’s just so, so easy because you don’t have to fiddle around with columns. With the columns block, you don’t have to measure which one is faster because it does it automatically. So that’s a really nice feature.
Tammie Lister: And quality of life things is things we always would do. And it just. When the editor does expectations of what you would do, that’s when it’s next level. And it’s also refinement. It shows maturity of the editor, maturity of using it and also listening to user feedback.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. And the other. So we didn’t talk about it, but I don’t want to prolong this, but do you have a favorite feature from Webpoint 7.0 apart from the real time collaboration and the AI connectors?
Tammie Lister: Apart from real time collaboration and the AI, you’re just picking all like my favorite children and then take. Can I actually go a little bit wide and include.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Any tiny little quality of life bug fix? Because I think any track ticket we manage to close or quality of life bug fix that comes in that and we don’t necessarily highlight them. And I know we’re talking about features and we’re talking about stuff like that. That. But I would also say apart from that, anything in Storybook or that say or a component or anything like that, that that is going to be my favorite because it just means that we can build more cool stuff. But honestly, like yeah, it’s. It’s not a feature but it’s like any tickets we closed Anything we improved that isn’t visible or seen, that’s amazing for me.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what really got the people excited about 7.0 is the new revisions panel with 23.0 in Gutenberg. It also comes to templates, template parts and to patterns, which is really kind of going through the whole editor and edit screen where you can have the revision screen screen.
Tammie Lister: I am very happy to see that gone because that slider needs to be buried. Bless it. It is old. We did it a while ago and
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, it definitely needed to go. But I think the implementation interface.
Tammie Lister: Not an interface of today. We can debate what the interface today is, but it is not that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I like that it’s it. It knows about blocks and it has these night color changes and you can. You actually can do it in the block editor. You don’t have to go out of that and come in again.
Tammie Lister: You have to go do it. I’m all for being in different frames of mind thinking when you can move to different spaces, but no, no, not in this one.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So yeah, I pointed that out. It’s coming, people, even if you missed it in 7.0.
Tammie Lister: So your favorite feature coming. Because you asked me mine. So is that your favorite apart from AI and apart from collaborative energy? Because you’re not allowed to pick those either.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: If I click that. Yeah. Well, I like that. You can have now video backgrounds in external video URLs for cover. For the cover block is really cool. And I like the revisions. It’s definitely the. Yeah, because I did the Source of Truth and there’s all the things in there. But I looked at the revisions and it was 64 and I said, oh, it can handle that. That’s awesome. IT can handle 64 revisions in the block editor in the first thing. Yeah. So I also like the Source of Truth. Where is it? Here it is. I need the list in front of me so you kind of remember what’s coming. WordPress 7.0 and my Internet just gave out. No, Tammy is still here. Can’t be the Internet. Oh, I definitely like the breadcrumbs block. Yeah, that’s really cool.
Tammie Lister: Yeah. And that actually really. Because many times you’ve had to hack around it using like the navigation block or doing something really funky.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And. And you need a plugin for that. Yeah. And it’s such a.
Tammie Lister: Literally I’ve seen people use the navigation and then just do like a port of it into a plugin or something like that. That’s what they’ve kind of taken or hard They’ve just done some weird stuff. I’ve seen some weird combinations break. So having a native one is really good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Really good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the other one was the gallery lightbox that it actually has navigation now. Yeah. You can go through back and forth. Yes. So it was kind of missing from the last implementation, but yeah. So that’s pretty much it. It’s kind of. I. I like all of it. But yeah, those are the. The favorite ones.
Tammie Lister: So it’s honestly like. I think that’s the thing. Not picking the two. That is going to be good. But for me it’s captive editing. Again, not with humans.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I. I only excluded it because we talked about it before already.
Tammie Lister: I know. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And. And it kind of. Yeah, yeah. So what’s that?
Tammie Lister: That’s going to be interesting to. To see in demos. Right. Rather than having to have two people on stage doing it, we’re going to be able to see in demos like having non humans.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. You know. No, I definitely want to try Gary Bendergast plugin to kind of figure out how I can use that to my. Because I’m in WordPress all the time with the good work times and I need some help there. Yeah. So. And I had a few workflows kind of with how do I find stuff and all that already and like a research. So. Right.
Tammie Lister: I have a first draft in for you could get the change logs, pull them in first of all.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, we can. So but what’s also.
What’s in Active Development or Discussed
And now we come to the what’s in active development and discussed and one of them is the media editor experiment that a group of contributors are working on. That’s a new component. It started with the image cropper. Yeah. Kind of have a better image cropper that kind of. Because the one that we have where it just kind of enlarge it and then kind of figure it out where to go. Yeah. I need a drag and drop kind of thing to crop things.
Tammie Lister: And also that the native cropper doesn’t always work.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah, yeah. So Ramon and Andrew are working on that and they had. They have it. It’s still a PR that’s not yet merged, but you can test it in Playground and I hope you can test it in Playground now. I think they wanted to put it in today and. And hook it up to the experiment page so you can test it. But it’s when you’re on an image block and you click then on the cropping tool, it opens up a new modal and then you can do all. You can rotate. You can enlarge and resize it, and you can crop it and you can do all kinds of things. Okay, it’s merged now. Excellent. Thank you. So I’ll merge.
Tammie Lister: So I think it’s still experimental, but it is merged. So even better than Playground. It is merged and you can try it on experimental. I think based on what I’m looking at on the PR, that’s what it
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Looks like, but it’s not in 23.0 yet. It’s because it was merged after. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: She says in a big voice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: A big voice. It’s in 23.1. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Oh, yes. Okay. Try to remember numbering. That would be good. 23.1. I went straight to 24.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, but it’s going. But you can test it through the Gutenberg nightly because that’s already in the playground. So it’s really cool. It’s so early that people want to need some input from the users. So go and play with it. And with that, we’re coming to the end. It’s been a wonderful experience with you, Tammie. Thank you so much. Is there anything that you want to talk about that you didn’t get to. Because I restricted you.
Tammie Lister: You did not restrict me at all. Thank you so much.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, well, how can people find you when they want to look for
Tammie Lister: You as normal, comatose to all the things. And I look forward to seeing whoever’s going to WordCamp Europe as well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Awesome. So, as always, the show notes will be published in GutenbergTimes.com podcast. This is episode 130. And if you have any questions or suggestions or news that you want us to include, send them to changelogutenbergtimes.com that’s an email address changelogutenbergtimes.com so I thank you all for listening. It was good to be with you, Tammie, and thank you for your time. And this is goodbye until the next time. Bye.
Good news, dear friends. WordPress 7.0 has a new release date! May 20, 2026. Announced on Friday, the post featured the updated release party schedule: All release parties happen in the Make #core Slack channel. Everyone is welcome to join.
This week, I also traveled to Salzburg, Austria to discuss WordPress 7.0 features with the local community. It was a great joy to meet so many fellow community organizers from WordCamps Vienna, Europe and Kampala, as well as the local meetup organizers and participants from Salzburg.
Auf dem Weg nach Salzburg zum WordPress Meetup heute abend https://t.co/vQbGHHN8vv Wir werden uns über die Änderungen in WordPress 7.0 unterhalten und die neuen Features vorstellen #WordPress Es sind noch Plätze frei! pic.twitter.com/FqgjsaOYjA
Jonathan Desrosiers and Max Schmeling of the WordPress Core team has published Distributed RTC performance testing, a bash/PHP load-testing tool for the real-time collaboration HTTP polling endpoint coming in WordPress 7.0. Hosting providers can run scenarios — baseline, single idle, sustained polling, burst concurrency, and two-client editing — then submit results directly to WordPress.org. Only curl and bash are required, with WP-CLI optional. If you’re a host and need reporting credentials, ping Jonathan Desrosiers (@desrosj) or Amy Kamala (@amykamala) in the #hosting Slack channel.
JuanMa Garrido introduces the WordPress Core Dev Environment Toolkit, a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux that eliminates the painful setup that burns through Contributor Days before anyone writes a line of code. Powered by WordPress Playground, it bundles Git, Node, and npm as JS/WASM — so you install the app, click a button, and you’re cloning wordpress-develop, running a dev server, and generating Trac patches without touching a terminal.
The latest Dev note arrival brings you Roster of design tools per block (WordPress 7.0 edition). I updated a previous version for WordPress 7.0, summarizing design support changes across the last ten releases. WordPress 7.0 adds seven new blocks — Accordion, Breadcrumbs, Icon, Math, Post Time to Read, and the Term Query family — and renames Verse to Poetry. I also removed the Pattern Overrides/Block Bindings column, since both features are now opt-in per block and attribute, making a single checkbox no longer meaningful.
Gutenberg 23.0ships a revisions panel for templates, template parts, and patterns (experimental), and completes the Site Editor’s Design › Identity panel with Site Title and Tagline fields alongside the existing Logo and Icon. Real-time collaboration gets legacy meta box compatibility via a new opt-in flag, plus reliability fixes for concurrent edits and corrupted sync updates. 174 PRs merged, with 8 first-time contributors.
For the Gutenberg Changelog episode 130, Tammie Lister and I chatted about AI in Art and WordPress, WordPress 7.0 and Real-tine collaboration and Gutenberg plugin release 22.9 and 23.0. The episode will drop in your favorite podcast episode over the weekend. I hope you listen in and enjoy our conversation.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Brian Coords, developer advocate at WooCommerce, walks you througha prototype plugin called WP Content Types, a block-native take on custom post types and fields built directly into the WordPress interface using Data Views and Data Forms. You’ll see AI generate a Recipe content type, configure fields with core components, connect templates through block bindings, and explore a “Fields Only” modern UI. It’s a V1 vision for content modeling that leaves legacy backwards compatibility behind.
Coords implementation goes much further than a similar project “Create Content Model” Autumn Fjeld and Candy Tsai demo’d at WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila, Philippines. Their repo is available on GitHub including links to the talk and demo video.
In his latest video, Wes Theron walks you through using block dimensions to control layout in WordPress — without touching any CSS. You’ll learn how to find the dimensions panel in the editor and learn when to reach for padding (space inside a block), margin (space around it), block spacing (gaps between child blocks), and minimum height. Each setting gets a practical demo so you can confidently build cleaner, more polished pages with better visual hierarchy.
Alex de Borba makes a pointed case in Why Developers Keep Reaching for Builders Over Block Themes that the “block themes can’t compete” narrative is more habit than fact. With theme.json v3, register_block_style(), synced patterns, and wp_enqueue_block_style(), you can build design systems, reusable components, and performant layouts without proprietary tools — and without locking your clients into someone else’s ecosystem when developer relationships change.
At WordCamp Asia, the WordPress Speed Build Challenge returned for a second round: experienced builders had 30 minutes, a surprise brief revealed live on stage, and nothing but the Full Site Editor — no page builders, no custom code. Watch how they tackle layout, content, styling, and real-time problem-solving under pressure while narrating their decisions. A fun, unscripted window into smart site editor workflows for anyone curious about block-based building. The recording is now available on WordPressTV.
Upcoming Events
The 6th annual Web Agency Summit runs April 27–30, 2026. It’s free, virtual, and built for agency owners ready to stop winging it. Hosted by Vito Peleg, Stephanie Hudson, and Andrew Palmer, four days of live expert sessions cover the full agency arc: Build, Expand, Scale, and Thrive. Speakers include Eugene Levin from Semrush and Karim Marucchi of Crowd Favorite. Think of it as a week-long podcast you keep open while you work.
If you’re in New York on April 29, dev/ai/nyc with Hilary Mason is worth your evening. Hilary Mason — CEO of Hidden Door, founder of Fast Forward Labs, and former Chief Scientist at bit.ly — joins Jesse Friedman, who leads WP Cloud at Automattic, for a fireside chat on AI, creativity, and human-computer interaction. Doors open at 5:30 PM at Automattic’s NoHo space on Crosby Street, with drinks and bites after. Registration is on Luma. The event is free of charge.
The Checkout Summit in-person event just wrapped up in Palermo, Sicily — don’t be sad you missed the arancine and Aperol Spritz. Organizer Rodolfo Melogli of Business Bloomer will reassemble 18+ speakers for the online edition, {Reloaded}, on May 7–8, 2026 starting at just €20. The WooCommerce-focused lineup covers SEO after AI, MCP integrations, hosting security, Shopify comparisons, and scaling strategies — practical sessions, zero fluff, built for developers and agency pros.
Uganda’s biggest annual student web design competition, Website Projects Competition 2026, takes place on June 9, 2026 at Busoga College, Mwiri. Under the theme “Fueling Innovation Through WordPress,” 20 student teams across three age categories — Cubs (12 & under), Rising Stars (13–18), and Explorers (18+) — compete by building and pitching WordPress websites to a live audience of 200+. Sponsored by Automattic and Woo. Registration and sponsorship are open.
WordPress Accessibility Day 2026 is a free, 24-hour global livestream on October 7–8, 2026, dedicated to accessibility best practices for WordPress developers, designers, and content creators. The volunteer-led nonprofit event includes live captions and ASL interpretation for all sessions, with corrected transcripts published afterward. It’s pre-approved for IAAP continuing education credits. Sponsorships are now open, ranging from $150 Microsponsors to $5,000 Platinum packages.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Gina Lucia, freelance writer, published a beginner-friendly walkthrough on what WordPress block patterns are and how to use themfor OllieWP. You’ll learn how patterns differ from synced patterns, templates, and template parts, why block themes unlock their full potential for headers, footers, and full-page layouts, and how to browse, preview, insert, and customize curated patterns in Ollie’s pattern library. A handy primer if you’re moving from classic themes into the full site editing experience.
Nathan Wrigley sits down with Brian Gardner to talk block themes, AI, and the future of WordPress design. The Genesis co-creator argues that many developers are still judging the block editor by a five-year-old experience — and missing how far it’s come. He shares his work on Powder, explores how tools like Ollie and Miles are bridging AI-generated design with native WordPress blocks, and asks the question keeping him up at night: do we still need hundreds of themes, or is one solid base theme plus vertical-specific patterns actually the future?
JC Palmes, WebDev Studios and regular guest on the Gutenberg Changelog, makes the case that block themes can replace one-off chaos with repeatable consistency on large team projects. The approach: start with a shared starter theme, build a reusable pattern library, and centralize design decisions in theme.json. She also tackles the less glamorous side — onboarding developers, running QA, and finding the right balance between editorial freedom and long-term maintainability. Practical and team-focused, it’s a playbook worth your time if you’re managing multi-site or multi-developer WordPress work.
Anne Katzeff walks you through using the Cover block as a Hero sectionwith a Call to Action. Starting from default settings, she shows how alignment (wide or full width), overlay color and opacity, minimum height, focal point, and inner block layout work together to create a polished hero.
Katzeff also created a companion video tutorial to follow along with how she manipulates the cover block for her purposes. All very practical and beginner-friendly.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2025” A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly.
Automattic’s head of global expansion James Grierson argues in WordPress: The Operating System of the Agentic Web that WordPress’s open-source transparency, 90,000+ plugin ecosystem, REST API, and MCP support make it the ideal foundation for AI agents. WordPress.com’s full MCP write capabilities — launched in March 2026—let agents create and manage content via natural conversation. Challenges remain around legacy code, inconsistent plugin quality, and PHP perception, but Grierson sees AI itself as the solution to those very problems.
Inspired by a trip to WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai, Chandra Patel built the WordPress REST API Playground — a free plugin developed entirely with Claude Code in just 2–3 hours. The three-panel interface lets you browse all registered REST API routes, build requests with schema-driven form fields, and view syntax-highlighted responses with timing info. A handy Code tab generates ready-to-use JavaScript, PHP, and cURL snippets for every request. Available on GitHub.
Pablo Postigo used Studio Code, Automattic’s new AI coding agent for building WordPress sites locally, to finally redesign Govoid.es, a geek news blog he co-founded in 2009 that’s been dormant since 2013. He used Claude to craft a detailed design brief, fed it to Studio Code (running Claude Opus 4.7), and got a complete minimalist dark-mode block theme generated in one shot, with only a couple of hours of refinement before pushing straight to production. Studio Code is still in alpha, there will be dragons
Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience.
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
Building on the Abilities API and three read-only core abilities (core/get-site-info, core/get-user-info, core/get-environment-info) shipped in 6.9, WordPress 7.0 brings the server-side WP AI Client. Together these form the baseline: a way to declare what WordPress can do, and a way to connect to providers that reason about it. This post outlines what I’d like to […]
Akismet WordPress plugin v5.7 is out today. This release focuses on fitting more neatly into where WordPress is heading next.
Abilities API support
Akismet now supports the Abilities API, giving WordPress a clear, structured way to understand what Akismet can do, like checking content for spam or retrieving stats.
It’s a subtle change, but it makes integrations more predictable and easier to build on top of.
Connectors (for WordPress 7.0)
We’ve also added early support for WordPress Connectors, which is landing in WordPress 7.0.
Connectors provide a consistent way to manage API keys and external services across plugins. With Akismet ready for this, your API key setup will slot into a more unified experience as sites upgrade.
Plus the usual polish
A handful of fixes and improvements round things out to keep things running smoothly.
To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in the WordPress plugins directory.
Site speed is crucial for e-commerce success; delays lead to cart abandonment, especially on mobile. Experts discuss caching solutions and user experience improvements to enhance conversion rates.
The "Keep It Open" initiative emphasizes sustainability and independence in the open web community, inviting contributors to support honest conversations without focusing on rewards or exclusivity.
Before you dive headfirst into all the big and small changes and pick your favorites, make sure to read these preliminary thoughts about this post and how to use it. If you have questions, leave a comment or email me at pauli@gutenbergtimes.com.
Huge Thank You to all collaborators on this post: Anne McCarthy, Sarah Norris, Ella van Durpe, Maggie Cabrera, Ben Dwyer, Jonathan Bossenger, Justin Tadlock, Dave Smith, Courtney Robertson and a lot more. It’s takes a village…
Estimated reading time
21–31 minutes
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4,911 words
Table of Contents
Changelog
Any changes are cataloged here as the release goes on.
April 23, 2026
WordPress 7.0 has a new release date: May 20th, 2026! (see post).
The RTC performance testing script automatically tests all 4 possible architecture approaches. Follow the instructions on the repository. Still under development, though. Release and Call for hosting testing planned for Friday April 24. (See Slack discussion)
RTC: Added Introduce filters for the polling intervals (76518)
March 27, 2026: First edition
Important note/guidelines
Try not to just copy and paste what’s in this post since it’s going to be shared with plenty of folks. Use this as inspiration for your own stuff and to get the best info about this release. If you do copy and paste, just remember that others might do the same, and it could lead to some awkward moments with duplicate content floating around online.
Each item has been tagged using best guesses with different high-level labels so that you can more readily see at a glance who is likely to be most impacted.
Each item has a high-level description, visuals (if relevant), and key resources if you would like to learn more.
Overview
Note: As always, what’s shared here is being actively pursued but doesn’t necessarily mean each will make it into the final release of WordPress 7.0.
WordPress 7.0 introduces several new features and performance enhancements.
Key new features include:
Real-time collaboration: multiple users can now work on the same post.
Navigation overlays: Customizable mobile menus for more flexible styling.
Content focused pattern editing: Pattern editing now prioritizes the content editing experience with more available options when needed.
Visual revisions: A new revisions screen inside the block editor gives a visual preview of the changes with an easy-to-understand color-coded system.
AI Foundation in WordPress: User can connect their site to an AI agent of choice to use the AI experiments plugin. Plugin developers can use the Connectors API to register connections to external services.
Furthermore, WordPress 7.0, entails:
Two new blocks: the Icon block and the Breadcrumbs block.
Viewport-based block show/hide: Block visibility extended to customize display according to screen-sizes.
Gallery lightbox navigation: improved browsing through images placed in a gallery.
Font management for all themes: The screen to upload and manage fonts is now available in the Appearance menu for classic and block themes.
Many more quality of life changes for workflow and design tools made it into this release. You’ll find the complete list below.
Of note, this release consists of features from the Gutenberg plugin version 22.0 – 22.6. Here are the release posts of those plugin releases: 22.0 | 22.1 | 22.2 | 22.3 | 22.4 | 22.5 | 22.6. Later Gutenberg releases contain bug fixes, backported to WordPress 7.0. release branches.
To make this document easier to navigate based on specific audiences, the following tags are used liberally:
[end user]: end user focus.
[theme builder]: block or classic theme author.
[plugin author]: plugin author, whether block or otherwise.
[developer]: catch-all term for more technical folks.
[site admin]: this includes a “builder” type.
[enterprise]: specific items that would be of interest to or particularly impact enterprise-level folks
[all]: broad impact to every kind of WordPress user.
How can you use these? Use your browser’s Find capability and search for the string including the brackets. Then use the arrows to navigate through the post from one result to the next.
Short video on how to use the tags to navigate the post.
Multiple users can now work on the same page at the same time, seeing each other’s changes as they happen. No more “someone else is editing this” warnings. Whether you’re co-writing a post, reviewing a layout, or making last-minute edits before publishing, everyone stays in sync without leaving the editor.
It represents the biggest step toward achieving full collaborative editing, not only for newsrooms and big publishing houses. It also simplifies working on a site editing for agencies and their clients as well as designers and writers working together on a post.
A presence indicator in the editor header shows who’s currently editing. Under the hood, title, content, and excerpt now sync via Y.text for more granular conflict resolution, and numerous reliability fixes address disconnection handling, revision restores, and performance metrics. (75286, 75398, 75065, 75448, 75595).
You can enable the feature via Settings > Writing. Check the box next to Enable early access to real-time collaboration, in the Collaboration section.
The infrastructure implementation uses HTTP polling for universal compatibility, CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type) update data is stored persistently in post_meta on a special internal wp_sync_storage post type (one per “room”/document).
The sync provider architecture is designed so that the storage and transport layer can be swapped out. Updates are batched and periodically compacted. WordPress code initially limits simultaneous collaborators to two to protect hosts. (64622).
Hosting companies have the option to add a different provider. There will be a wp-config constant that can be used to change the defaults.
Introduces JavaScript filters to allow third party developers to slow down or speed up polling via the RTC client. (76518).
Since October, WordPress VIP beta participants — spanning newsrooms, research institutions, and enterprise publishers — tested the real-time collaboration against live editorial workflows, reporting back what worked, what broke, and what they couldn’t live without. Their voices didn’t just validate the feature — they shaped it.
Matias Ventura explains why the WordPress 7.0 cycle is being extended by a few weeks: the real-time collaboration feature needs more time to nail its data architecture. After Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, expressed a preference to revisit the proposed custom table for syncing presence and content changes, the team is refining the design before committing.
The proposal for custom table to keep a record of the changes to a post/page from each browser window, was discussed in the trac ticket (64696)
Plugin developers relying on metaboxes will want to take note — collaborative editing is disabled when metaboxes are present, making this cycle your window to migrate.
Navigation Overlays and more [theme builder][plugin author] [site admin]
Navigation blocks now have customizable overlays and give user full control over mobile hamburger menus. A prominent Create overlay button in the side bar guides you through the setup, providing a selection of patterns to achieve various designs for your overlay. WordPress 7.0 comes with multiple built-in patterns including centered navigation, accent backgrounds, and black backgrounds. New blocks default to “always” showing overlays. The Navigation block sidebar section also shows a preview of the selected overlay template parts. You can also access the list of Navigation Overlays via Appearance > Editor > Patterns > Template Parts.
To make it easier for users to create custom overlays for their mobile navigation, four new patterns are now available for the navigation overlay template parts:
Submenus: Always visible option: Users can now add navigation blocks to their overlays and toggle if they’d like to have the submenus always visible or not. (74653)
Page Creation in Navigation: Create pages directly from the Navigation block with helpful Snackbar notices and improved parent page search using relevance matching (72627, 73836).
Treating patterns like a single block [all]
Get ready for a smoother, more intuitive experience when using patterns in WordPress 7.0. It’s becoming much easier to customize your site’s design sections with a simplified editing workflow and an improved content-focused mode.
Users naturally stay in the safe lane without accidentally breaking designs. Agencies can hand off a site knowing clients can’t wreck the layout by default — they’d have to deliberately choose to go deeper.
What’s New for Patterns:
Quick Content Edits: When you select a pattern, instead of seeing a list of individual blocks, you’ll see a clean, expanded inspector panel. This panel exposes all the editable text and image fields directly, organized for easy access.
Content-Only Focus: Patterns will now default to a Content-Only editing mode. This simplifies the experience by letting you quickly fill in the content without seeing all the underlying design tools.
Full Customization (If You Need It): If you do need to change the structure or design of a pattern, you can simply “detach” it. This gives you full access to all the individual blocks, just like before. Use the Edit Pattern button from the sidebar.
A Unified Experience: This new approach makes patterns feel like single, smart design objects with easy-to-update attributes, whether you’re using a pattern, a design section, or a partially synced pattern.
AI in WordPress [enterprise][developers][site admin]
WordPress 7.0 ships with a WP AI client API and a built-in Connectors screen — a centralized hub for managing all kinds of external service integrations, not just AI providers. Connect to OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini and WordPress automatically installs the right plugin and prompts you for your API key. Developers get a consistent framework to build on—enabling features like content generation, block building, and theme creation without reinventing the plumbing every time.
The new Connectors page also sports a shout-out to the AI Experiments plugin if users want to see AI features, like title, excerpt, or alt-text generation, in action.
But the real value of this Connectors API is broader: any plugin that needs to connect to an outside service via API keys or other credentials can tap into this standardized connection management system. Users get one place to maintain all their integrations. And plugin developer a standardized way to tap into the plumbing.
How revisions work for the block editor was completely reimagined. The visual Revisions screen keeps you in the editor the entire time, activating a subtle revision mode right where you work, eliminating the need to jump to a separate screen. A timeline slider in the header allows you to browse through different versions, seeing content updates in real-time.
The system highlights visual differences, showing added and removed text, formatting changes, and outlining modified blocks instead of raw code. For long documents, a mini-map along the scrollbar indicates where changes exist, letting you jump directly to them, and the sidebar remains useful with a summary of the changes for the current revision. To simplify reverting, the “Update” or “Publish” button is replaced by a “Restore” button when you are browsing the history (74742).
Yellow marks a changed section/block, in red you’ll find deletions and green are additions compared to the early version.
Anne McCarthy also gives a great walk through the screens on Youtube:
New Blocks
Breadcrumbs Block [all]
The new native Breadcrumbs block in WordPress 7.0 provides dynamic navigational trails for the Site Editor. It automatically generates paths from the homepage to the current page, adapting to context.
The block handles hierarchical pages (e.g., “Home / Services / Web Design / Portfolio”) and includes taxonomy for blog posts (e.g., “Home / Technology / Your Post Title”). Beyond simple pages, it correctly constructs paths for archive pages (category, tag, author, date), search results, and 404 errors. For Custom Post Types, it includes the post type archive in the trail.
The block offers alignment options (left, center, right, wide/full), as well as other block design options. Additional settings are available for showing the last item as text or a link and consistent homepage handling (72649).
The new Icon block empowers users to add decorative icons from a curated collection to their content. It utilizes a new server-side SVG Icon Registration API, ensuring icon registry updates propagate without block validation errors.
The initial release is limited as it doesn’t yet allow registering third-party icon collections. Extensibility for third-party icon registration is planned for future release in 7.1, following further development on the Icon registry API architecture. A REST endpoint at /wp/v2/icons supports searching and filtering. The initial set draws from the wordpress/icons package (71227, 72215, 75576).
Block Editor enhancements
Custom CSS for Individual Blocks [enduser][site admin] [theme builder]
Previously, applying custom CSS to a block instance required adding a custom class name and then writing a rule in the Site Editor’s global Custom CSS. This two-step process was complex for most users and inaccessible to content editors without Site Editor access.
A new custom CSS block support introduces a Custom CSS input to the Advanced panel within the block editor sidebar, conveniently placed next to the familiar “Additional CSS Class(es)” field. You only need to add the CSS declarations (no selectors!) If you do need to target nested elements, use the & symbol (for example, & a { color: red; }). This field is focused purely on styling and will reject any HTML input. The field is guarded by the edit_css capability to see and use this powerful new field. The editor automatically adds a has-custom-css class for styling consistency. #73959, #74969.
When you’re editing a post or page, you can now choose to show or hide any block depending on the visitor’s screen size. Select a block, click Show in the toolbar, and pick which devices — desktop, tablet, or mobile — should display it. You can also hide a block from the document entirely through the same modal.
Anchor support for dynamic blocks [developer][plugin author]
Dynamic blocks now support Anchor (id attribute) functionality. The anchor reference is consistently stored within the block comment delimiter, enabling dynamic rendering on the front end. (74183)
Paste color values in the color picker [end user][theme builder] [site admin]
Color pickers throughout the block styles sidebar, now offer support for pasting complete color values. You can now copy/paste the brand colors from a design document or website into the color picker box and don’t have to go through the process of selecting the right color and hue (73166).
Dimension support for width and height [theme builder][site admin]
WordPress 7.0 expands the Dimensions block supports system with three significant improvements: width and height are now available as standard block supports under dimensions, and themes can now define dimension size presets to give users a consistent set of size options across their site.
Collaborators can now get notified when someone leaves a note on their content. No more checking back constantly (73645).
Block Attributions Groups in the sidebar [all]
The block editor sidebar is being reorganized to make controls easier to find. Block settings will be grouped into four clear sections:
Content (text, images, captions),
List (reordering and nesting for blocks like Lists and Social Icons),
Settings (block-specific options), and
Styles (typography, colors, spacing).
This means you won’t need to hunt through toolbars or scattered panels — everything will live in a predictable place in the sidebar. Connected data sources will also appear directly next to the attributes they affect, so you can see at a glance what’s linked and where. It also means that for the transition a reordering of the sidebar and controls to be in different place than before. For instance. For an image block that includes the “Alt” text setting is now to be found in the content tab rather than the settings tab. (73845)
Here’s an example of the implementation for Patterns:
Link Control validation [end user] [site admin]
The Link Control component in Gutenberg now validates the URLs, you enter helping to avoid broken links (73486).
Improved Blocks and Block handling
Pseudo Styles for Button Blocks [theme builder][site admin]
Theme designers and developers can now style button states (hover, focus, active, and focus visible) directly within the theme.json, making it much easier to keep all design controls centralized and consistent. This reduces the reliance on custom CSS for things like button hover states (71418).
Extra divs removed from blocks in the editor [theme builder][developer][site admin]
WordPress 7.0 introduced a new HtmlRenderer component, which renders HTML content as React elements with optional wrapper props. For theme authors, this means that several blocks will no longer have an extra wrapping <div> in the editor, allowing for consistent styling with the front end (74228).
Nearly all text blocks now support the standardized text-align block support system, including Paragraph, Button, Comment blocks, Heading, and Verse. Plus, text justify alignment is now available. See tracking issue to follow along on the progress (60763).
Cover Block Video Embeds [site admin][end user]
For the Cover block this release comes with the ability to use embedded videos (like YouTube or Vimeo) as background videos in the Cover block, rather than being restricted to locally uploaded files. Offloading video to 3rd-party services helps reduce hosting and bandwidth costs. Also, the focal pointer is now available for fixed background. (#73023, #74600).
Gallery Block
Lightbox navigation [site admin][end user]
The Gallery block’s “Enlarge on click” lightbox now lets you navigate between images. When you click a gallery image, back/next buttons appear so you can browse through the rest of the gallery without closing the lightbox. Keyboard navigation (arrow keys) and screen reader announcements are fully supported. It also works with swiping on mobile, however the swiping isn’t yet visual/animated. (62906) and lightbox items still miss captions.
Content Tab in sidebar [site admin][end user]
For fast access to Alt text box the sidebar of the Gallery block shows a new content tab in the sidebar.
The Grid block is now responsive even when you set a column count. Previously, you had to choose between setting a minimum column width (responsive, Auto mode) or a fixed column count (Manual mode)—a binary toggle that confused many users. Now you can set both: when you do, the column count becomes a maximum, and the grid scales down responsively based on your minimum column width.
You can set neither, either, or both—the block handles all combinations gracefully. The confusing Auto/Manual toggle is gone entirely, replaced by clearer “minimum width” and “columns” labels with a plain-language description explaining the relationship between the two controls.. (73662)
Heading block variations [site admin][end user]
Each heading level (H1-H6) is now registered as a block variation on the Heading block. These do not appear in the inserter, but the change does add icons to the block’s sidebar for transforming it between variations (73823).
HTML Block Enhancement [site admin] [themebuilder] [end user]
The HTML block was redesigned to work now as a modal-based editor featuring separate tabs for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Admin can now use it for more powerful customizations, when HTML JS and CSS work on a single block. (73108).
Image block inline editing and controls [site admin][end user]
WordPress 7.0 comes with a revamp of the image editing feature in the editor. It’s now easier to crop, rotate or zoom in on a particular image corner. (#72414) (#73277).
Advanced Image Controls [site admin][end user]
Image block now supports the focal point control and aspect ratio adjustments for wide and full alignments, plus reorganized inspector controls with a dedicated content tab. #73115, #74519, #74201
Math Block Improvements [end users][site admin]
LaTeX input now uses a monospaced font, and style options are available for better mathematical expression editing (72557, 73544).
Paragraph [all]
A new typography tool has been added for specifying the line indent of paragraph blocks (73114, 74889). Users and theme creators can specify line indentation rules for a single paragraph block and also at global styles / theme.json level for all paragraph blocks. For global styles and theme.json, it’s possible to choose whether all paragraphs or only subsequent paragraphs are indented, which accounts for different indentation standards around the world.
Now that there is block support for typographical columns, the paragraph block can now handle text columns by default (74656).
On the front-end only, the Paragraph block now has a .wp-block-paragraph class. This change doesn’t affect global styles, which still use the p selector.(71207)
Query Loop Enhancements [all]
Query loops now support excluding terms. When the block is locked it now hides design change and choose pattern options. #73790, #74160
Verse Block, renamed to Poetry [all]
The Verse Block has been renamed to Poetry block (74722) Also it now utilizes border-box for its box-sizing, which guards against overflow issues and should make it easier to style without additional custom CSS.
Admin / Workflow updates
Manage fonts for all themes in a dedicated page [site admin][theme builder] [enterprise]
A dedicated Fonts page is now available under the Appearance menu for all themes. Until now, font management has lived deep inside Global Styles, requiring navigation through several panels to install or preview a font. This new standalone page lets block theme users browse, install, and manage their typography collection in one dedicated space.
Under the hood, this page is built on a new routing infrastructure for the Site Editor, designed to improve navigation and support new top-level pages in wp-admin. View transitions are now wired into this routing layer, providing early zoom/slide animations when navigating between pages (73630, 73876, 73586).
The Font Library and Global Styles also work with classic themes (#73971, #73876). Like the Media Library, you can access the Font Library as a modal or through a dedicated admin section—regardless of your theme type.
Command Palette in Adminbar [all]
Instantly access all the tools you need with a single click using the new Command Palette shortcut in the Omnibar! In 7.0 Beta 5, logged-in editors will see a field with a ⌘K or Ctrl+K symbol in the upper admin bar that unfurls the command palette when clicked. The new command palette entry point streamlines navigation and customization, giving you full control from anywhere on your site – whether you’re editing, designing or just browsing plugins.
View Transitions [all]
View transitions have been integrated into the WordPress admin in 7.0, enabling smooth transitions between screens. The implementation for the front end is slated for the next WordPress 7.1 (64470) The result is a smoother page-to-page transitions using the CSS View Transitions API — no markup or JavaScript changes required, just a progressive enhancement you’ll notice immediately when navigating between admin screens.
Improved screens across WP-Admin [all]
WordPress 7.0 is getting a CSS-only “coat-of-paint” visual reskin of the wp-admin, bringing the classic admin screens closer to the visual language of the block and site editors — no markup changes, no JavaScript, no functional changes, and all existing CSS class names and admin color schemes preserved. (64308)
New default color scheme: “Modern” replaces “Fresh” as the default admin color scheme (#64546)
Updated buttons and input fields: primary, secondary, and link buttons, plus text inputs, selects, checkboxes, and radio buttons, now align with the WordPress Design System (#64547)
Updated notices: info, warning, success, and error notices refreshed for clarity and consistency (#64548), including on the login screen
Updated cards and metaboxes: dashboard widgets and metaboxes get modernized styling (#64549)
New wp-base-styles stylesheet handle: consolidates admin color scheme CSS custom properties into a single reusable stylesheet, available across the admin and the block editor content iframe
Login and registration screens: the WordPress logo updated from blue to gray to match the new design, and scheme styles now apply to login, install, database repair, and upgrade screens
Developer Goodies [developer][enterprise]
Client-side Abilities API
WordPress 7.0 ships a JavaScript counterpart to the server-side Abilities API introduced in 6.9. The Client-Side Abilities API arrives as two packages: @wordpress/abilities for pure state management usable in any project, and @wordpress/core-abilities, which auto-fetches server-registered abilities via the REST API. You can now register browser-only abilities — navigation, block insertion, and more — opening the door to browser agents, extensions, and WebMCP integrations directly in the client.
WP AI Client
WordPress 7.0 ships a built-in AI Client, that gives your plugin a single, provider-agnostic PHP entry point — wp_ai_client_prompt() — for text, image, speech, and video generation. You describe what you need; WordPress routes it to whichever AI provider the site owner has configured via Settings > Connectors. Official provider plugins cover Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. No credential handling, no provider lock-in, and graceful feature detection before any UI is shown.
PHP-only block registration
Developers can now create simple blocks using only PHP. This is meant for blocks that only need server-side rendering and aren’t meant to be highly interactive. When possible this feature also auto-generates sidebars for user input for suitable attributes and design tools.
To do so, call register_block_type with the new autoRegister flag. A render_callback function must also be provided. (71792)
Since WordPress 6.5, Pattern Overrides let you create synced patterns where the layout stays consistent but specific content can change per instance. The catch? Only four core blocks supported it: Heading, Paragraph, Button, and Image.
Not anymore. Any block attribute that supports Block Bindings now supports Pattern Overrides by default. Block authors can opt in through the server-side block_bindings_supported_attributes filter. This closes a long-requested enhancement and opens up synced patterns to custom blocks (73889).
DataViews, Data Form components and Fields API
A substantial API update introduces new layouts, validation rules, grouping options, and picker improvements affecting plugins using wordpress/dataviews. The Dev Note has all the pertinent details: DataViews, DataForm, et al. in WordPress 7.0
UI Primitives and Components
The WordPress UI package just got a significant update, adding multiple new components and tools to help developers create more polished and accessible interfaces for WordPress users.
[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 managed WordPress hosting and AI hosting innovation.
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 Malcolm Peralty. Malcolm has been immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for 20 years, starting out as a full-time blogger and working his way through tech roles in project management, agencies, and even a stint in the Drupal space. These days, Malcolm is bringing his experience back to WordPress, serving as a technical account manager at Pressable, a managed WordPress hosting company.
Malcolm shares how he found his way from early forays with WordPress to managing large scale hosting environments. He talks about the lure of the Drupal world, and why he’s ultimately returned to WordPress and Pressable.
We discuss what technical account management means at Pressable, how his role differs from sales and support, focusing instead on long-term strategy for clients, performance optimization, and bridging the gap between customer needs and the underlying WP Cloud infrastructure. We hear how Pressable proactively helps clients, sometimes even advising them to downgrade their plan if optimizations mean they need fewer resources.
We go behind the scenes in Pressable, getting into how hardware considerations, plugin bloat, WooCommerce or LMS sites, and customer handholding, all come together inside one company. Malcolm gives us a candid look at performance challenges, the way hosts interact with infrastructure teams, and why education around WordPress performance is so tough, even as competing platforms prioritise speed at all costs.
We also look into the future. What are the cutting edge trends in hosting? Like database replication, virtual clusters, and especially the rise of AI within the hosting experience. Malcolm explains Pressable’s upcoming MCP, an AI powered control panel that promises to let you deploy, and manage, wordPress sites using natural language.
We explore how AI will impact everything from customer support to site deployment, potential pitfalls, and the challenge of balancing automation with human relationships.
If you’re curious about the state of managed WordPress hosting today, the interplay of tech, support, and AI, or just want to know what’s happening behind the curtain, this episode is for you.
If you’re interested in finding 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 Malcolm Peralty.
I am joined on the podcast by Malcolm Peralty. Hello, Malcolm.
[00:03:55] Malcolm Peralty: Hi there. How you doing today?
[00:03:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Very nice to have you with us on the podcast today. Malcolm’s got a really interesting story. He’s done a lot, a lot of it kind of maps to things that I’ve done in my life. But it’s a tech podcast, generally we talk about WordPress, but I think we’re going to talk about hosting, AI, and possibly other CMSs.
But before we do, a moment for you, Malcolm, just to introduce yourself and give us your potted bio, I guess centering around your relationship with technology, WordPress, CMSs, that kind of thing.
[00:04:22] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah. So first off, I like to always say that I’m Canadian. I think that actually kind of gives us some insight into a little bit about how I think. And I live just outside of Toronto, Ontario, Canada right now, and I’ve been in the WordPress, around the WordPress space for going on 20 years.
I started with WordPress 0.72, so before the 1.0 release. And I was a full-time blogger, talking about WordPress for several years, and kind of stumbled into using some of my tech skills to work in and around technology with WordPress, and then project management. And because of project management, I’ve been able to work with agencies that build like smartphone apps and other CMS systems, and custom CMSs for customers. But I’ve always kind of kept a toe in the WordPress world as much as possible.
[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and you firmly landed back in the WordPress world working for Pressable, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But you had a bit of a foray in the Drupal, Acquia world, I think. The word Acquia may not mean a great deal to people listening to this podcast, but it’s kind of the equivalent, I suppose the best mapping would be Automattic over on the Drupal side. What was your experience with Drupal? How come you’re not still fully on the Drupal side of things?
[00:05:35] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, so that was kind of a strange one for me. I didn’t expect to have a position in the Drupal world. I had done some like Drupal project management before, a lot of like moving Drupal sites to WordPress or like revising a Drupal site, or adding a smartphone app to a Drupal site. But that was mostly, again, as like a project manager or a site builder, not as like someone who really understood the engineering behind Drupal.
But a long time friend of mine reached out and said, hey, would you ever be interested in a job at Acquia working at the Drupal mothership, so to speak? And the position was a technical account manager, which thankfully leans more on my skills as a project manager and someone who understands web hosting than someone who understands Drupal. So I was able to use the combination of 20 years of skills in the space to actually make a good go at it.
And I think one of the big reasons why I was so enticed and interested by the position is, honestly, Drupal jobs pay better than WordPress jobs. And it’s horrible and sad to say, but I think it was a really important factor in my determination on where my career was moving. If it wasn’t for the fact that Pressable came along when it did, and basically offered me a similar kind of pay scale, I’d probably still be in the Drupal space and who knows for how long.
[00:06:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I was a big Drupal user for many years but just found it was, there was a lot of things that I didn’t need that Drupal did, that WordPress could do. And so I firmly moved ship away from Drupal. Well, I think it was when Drupal finally went to version eight, so many, many years ago. Something like 2015 or something like that. And I certainly haven’t looked back.
So Pressable, you may need to go and Google that if you’re listening to this podcast. You may have heard that name before, but it is a hosting company, I guess managed hosting, dedicated hosting for WordPress websites. My understanding is they don’t do anything else. Pressable simply work with WordPress. But what’s your role over there? Let’s begin there.
[00:07:37] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, so I’m a technical account manager. I’m the second technical account manager that Pressable has hired. They’re trying to build out a technical account management discipline. For those that haven’t heard the term technical account management before, you might think it’s like a sales role or something like that with a technical bent, and that’s not it at all.
We’re basically, you know, like WordPress and WordPress hosting strategists, right? So we’re thinking about like, what does your website look like a year from now, two years from now? What technologies do you need to be aware of? What end of lifes will come up that you might need to develop against? What plugins and tools are you using and how performant are they, and are there more performant options in the mix that might work for you? And so that’s really kind of the role that we take at Pressable.
Right now a lot of it is also kind of the pre-sales, right? Like which tier of service or product will your website fit into? What kind of customisations or optimisations might you want to make in moving over to the Pressable platform? And so we kind of go through all of that with customers of kind of a certain scale and size.
[00:08:36] Nathan Wrigley: So do you, as part of the job description then, do you monitor existing websites that are on the platform already and look for, let’s say things like bottlenecks, where something’s going wrong? The client may not be aware of it, but you can then sort of inject yourself, begin a conversation and say look, you’ve got this suite of plugins, that’s great, but we’ve noticed that improvements could be made here, there, and the other. And here’s a suggestion for something that maybe will get rid of that problem.
[00:09:02] Malcolm Peralty: We do get to do a little bit of that, not as much as I would like. My long-term hope would be that, much like Acquia, much WordPress VIP, TAM would be like a subscription service that customers of a certain tier would be able to sign up for, and have like that consistent access and that consistent monitoring where, like on a monthly basis, you know, we’d go through our client list and like double check all of them.
Right now we’re sometimes a point of escalation for support if need be, where they’re like, this problem’s going to take more than an hour to solve. Maybe the solutions team and the TAMs can kind of take a look at this and dive deep into it. We also kind of monitor the data coming in from our server instances. And, yeah, we’ll sometimes kind of cherry pick some of the ones that are standing out as not working as well as they should be, or using more resources than they should be, just as a point of like general optimisation, right?
It’s funny because our role helps both the customer because, again, we don’t care about the money side, right. So we’ll come in and be like, here’s the optimisations you need to make. Now you don’t need even as quite a big a plan as you have maybe. Maybe you need to downsize your plan now because we’ve helped you optimise your website.
But from a resourcing perspective on the Pressable side, it’s also advantageous because one, it makes the company look good to be proactive in that way. And two, it helps for server resources, right? We have our own cloud, WP Cloud, which is our own server stack. It’s not AWS, it’s not Google Cloud. And so optimising resources can allow us to have resources available for other people who maybe are bursting because of a big sale or front page of Reddit or something like that. So we’re always looking at those optimisations as an opportunity on both.
[00:10:37] Nathan Wrigley: Do you, as part of your role, get to sort of interface somewhere between the customer, the people who pay you to have hosting and the hardware side of WP Cloud? Because presumably on the WP Cloud side of things, there’s a hardware layer. There’s literally people putting boxes into racks and putting the cables in and what have you.
Because my understanding is WP Cloud is owned, well, it’s not AWS, let’s call it that. It’s not Google’s Cloud infrastructure. It’s not any of those other things. It’s managed, known by whom, you can tell us in a moment. But do you get to have a conversation, say, look, we’ve noticed that this bit of hardware isn’t as performant as maybe something else? Or, look, here’s some new thing that’s been released onto the market, can we get a dozen of those and try that out?
[00:11:17] Malcolm Peralty: For sure. And as Pressable continues, try to move towards the higher end of mid market to try to acquire customers that are using WooCommerce or learning management systems, we’re finding those platform opportunities where we’re providing like, here’s what we’re seeing, you know, here’s all this data that we’re collecting. Here’s what we think this means. Here’s what maybe our competitors have done, or what our customers have noticed on competitor platforms. How can we either like negate the advantages of other platforms? Or how can we find ways to make ourselves even better than them? Or, here’s what we’re already doing, great, is there any fine tuning that we can do to like eek out that extra little bit of performance?
We try not to be too prescriptive with the WP Cloud team because they really are the experts in the hardware. But we bring a lot of that WordPress knowledge to bear and say like, this is what we’re seeing from a WordPress perspective, what can you do on a hardware and software on the server perspective to kind of make this work even better?
[00:12:12] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a difficult juggling act to perform in a way, isn’t it? Because on the one hand, we’re always talking about how performant WordPress can be, and on the other hand, we’re always talking about plugins and themes and the fact that amassing those will slow things down. You know, you throw in an LMS or WooCommerce or something like that and suddenly the website is going to be a different animal, let’s put it that way.
And so on the one hand, trying to pitch WordPress as performant, and then on the other hand, there’s this whole bit that you are dealing with where the performance is somewhat under question. I’ve always thought that’s a difficult challenge. And certainly in terms of marketing that and making the public understand that, okay, there’s the performance on one side, but we can manage that on the other side. I think that’s a really difficult thing to do because you’re trying to communicate something incredibly technical to presumably a whole load of people, some of whom aren’t technical at all.
[00:13:03] Malcolm Peralty: And even worse, a lot of other competing hosts will hide a lot of issues and faults and sins that customers have made on their website through like heavily used Redis setups that like just make it seem like their website is so much faster than it actually is. Or they’ll buy hardware that is, you know, has like the fastest CPUs. And so from you as a single user testing your website, you might say, wow, my website is so fast on this other platform, but when I move it to this company, now it feels slow. But you’re not doing a test at scale. You’re doing an individual test, right?
So you go on that hardware and you put like 25, 100, 1,000 users going through a checkout process, and all of a sudden your website is slow as molasses and starts falling over. Whereas on the platform that quote, unquote, seems slower, it’s so much more resilient and able to handle that load.
So there’s so much nuance here and so many things that we’re dealing with and a lot of the job ends up being at customer education because it’s very easy in the commodity hosting space to be like, I’m going to move to this other company because they seem faster. And that really shouldn’t be your single goal. It should be understanding your website. But a lot of small business owners, medium sized business owners, even large business owners don’t really necessarily want to understand how their website is built and how their pages are built and these kinds of things.
And it’s funny you mentioned about the WordPress performance thing because sometimes I want to be like, just do this one thing for me, right? On our platform, turn off all your plugins, go back to the default theme, tell me how fast your website loads because guess what, it’s probably going to load pretty darn fast, right?
The problem I have is the customers that have 50, 60, 70 plus plugins, and two of them are different like builder tools, which is unfortunately the bane of my existence. No offence to like Elementor and Divi and Beaver Builder and all these companies that are making these tools to help people have their dream website on the internet. But man, are they ever heavy and slow when you’re trying to create a performant website these days?
And so, you know, I’m often having these conversations about, what is most important to you? And understanding as well that search engines like Google, and search engine companies believe that performance is a big deal because that’s how they manage their own infrastructure, right? If a website is slow, then they can’t really crawl it effectively and understand what’s going on with it. So that plays into a lot of the conversations that I have as well. And it’s never easy.
[00:15:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I imagine it’s not. I mean, I don’t know if the goal of Pressable is to make it such that you show up with your website, pay your monthly subscription, whatever it may be, and kind of that’s it. We will take it from here. I don’t know if that’s the goal. Or if it’s more of a, we will have a conversation with you, we will make recommendations and over a period of time, we will come to some sort of happy medium where, you know, what you’ve got is what you are happy with and it’s also performant from our side.
So I don’t know how much of a conversation is there. Any website that I’ve ever brought to Pressable has been fairly straightforward. I’ve installed it, it’s worked exactly as I had anticipated, and so I’ve never really had to get into it. But, you know, a website with 10,000 SKUs, and a million visitors a day, presumably there has to be some handholding going on there.
[00:16:09] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, I think the big point of delineation is the cacheability of a site, right? So the ability for us to serve it without building the pages from scratch. If you have a brochure site, if you have a marketing site, if you are, you know, the only thing on your website that’s like a real user interaction is some buttons and maybe a form to submit, like a contact form or a marketing related form, your website is going to run perfectly on Pressable without any kind of handholding, without any kind of consultation. You’re going to be able to upload it and know it’s going to be resilient to whatever traffic you receive, and even like power outages in entire halfs of countries won’t bring your website down.
If that’s the kind of experience you want, those plan tiers exist and they work great. And we have agencies that throw thousands of websites on Pressable’s platform in that kind of umbrella without any kind of issue or concern or question.
I think the consultative part comes in when you’re starting to do things like I mentioned before, learning management systems, e-commerce systems, merch drops, custom contests. If you’re doing anything that basically has a different user experience based on adding something into a cart, or like completing a module of learning that needs to be tracked and following the user, typically this means that it’s going to be uncached, which means that it’s going to rebuild that page from scratch, and that requires a fair bit of resources.
We’ve optimised a lot of things to make sure that we can do that effectively, but again, the conversation comes into play, if you add in Facebook for WooCommerce plugin that breaks cache on every page load, then we have to work with our customers to understand like what that means, and what the trade-offs are, and what replacements might exist to make it so that we can cache the majority of sessions so that they can stick within their resource utilisations that we expect them to use.
Most companies, including Pressable will sell on like the number of visits to the website, but also another piece is the amount of workers, right? So these are the little pieces of software behind the scenes that actually complete all of the things that users are requesting, right? Serving up images and web pages and shopping carts and stuff like that.
We have a really cool model where we have one worker per one VCPU, which basically means you get your own dedicated highway for that worker. He’s his own little car on his own little highway lane. Where a lot of companies will do like 40 workers to one VCPU. So imagine 40 cars on one lane highway, versus five cars on a five lane highway. So the way that we process things is a little bit different as well, and so that requires a little bit of education on our side.
[00:18:32] Nathan Wrigley: I think there’s this whole mysterious scientific laboratory kind of impression to hosting, if you know what I mean? I’m imagining a room, a laboratory, sort of white walls and everything, with a bunch of people wearing white overalls with pens neatly lined up in their top pocket, and obsessing about these acronyms. Well, this isn’t an acronym, but you mentioned workers.
But you’ve got things like Redis, you’ve got things like edge caching and all of this kind of stuff. And honestly, to me, a lot of that is a bit of a puzzle. And I don’t know how you educate the public about those things other than just saying, just don’t worry about it. We’re here for you. We’ll deal with that complexity.
But also, I’m curious to know what kind of innovations are there still to be done? Now obviously we’re sort of crystal ball gazing a little bit here, but I am curious about where is the bleeding edge of server technology and hosting technology? What are the things which are just a little bit over the horizon, but are of interest, which may drop in the next year, two years, three years, something like that?
[00:19:34] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, I would say we’re seeing a lot of web assembly type efforts, which is kind of interesting, which is, yeah, I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen, there’s a WordPress Playground site where you can have like WordPress basically running in a browser. You don’t have to install it anywhere. It just exists in your browser as like this ephemeral install of WordPress that you can play with and do stuff with, and then export to a real install of WordPress if you’re interested.
I think that is a super impactful and interesting technology, and we’ll see probably more of that in the next little while, and how hosts can kind of play into that. I think that we’ll also see better caching technology, better database technology, but also I think better replication technology. So everyone knows that a lot of WordPress kind of exists within the database, and so if you want to have high availability, you need to be able to have that database exist in multiple places. But if you’re doing transactions on your like primary database for like e-commerce, you’re like buying products and you have, Malcolm bought a t-shirt from my website, he wants this size and he wants it shipped here, we need to now replicate that to any other like high availability databases that we have. That replication right now is very old technology in a lot of ways, and it’s not as optimised as we would like it to be. So there’s a latency that exists there in replicating that to other places.
Acquia and some of the other companies I worked for, that latency could be really high or really low depending on how it was configured, right? How long do we kind of keep that data there before we send it over?
We try to do as much real-time streaming at Pressable as possible to make it so like, you know, within like two seconds, the data is now in that replication. And so if your primary goes down, you’ve lost maybe a second or two seconds of data. On some websites, even that can be really bad, right? Because if you, let’s say you’re doing a big product drop and you have 10,000 people wanting to buy tickets to your concert, and you lose two seconds of data, that could be hundreds of transactions that just evaporate into the ether. So better ways of syncing that data across, and managing that relationship between multiple servers I think is going to be a big transition that we see in the marketplace.
We’re already seeing the idea of virtual clusters. So multiple data centres pretending to be like one local server. So then we don’t have that same feel of migrating or syncing data between locations, it just pretends it’s all kind of in the same place. So I think that will be kind of interesting to see because again, that adds more resiliency. And I think, everyone that I’ve ever talked to, if you say like, how long are you okay with your website being down? Even if it’s not a moneymaking website, you’ll hear them say something like, I don’t know, maybe an hour at most, right? So finding ways to make websites more resilient is going to be important.
And then I think just a better understanding just from top to bottom on what’s happening with a website, right? So we have a lot of logging, but it’s not necessarily the best at auditing. So, for example, if Nathan came on my website and got access to it and deleted a plugin, I might not have the best tools right now to be able to say, oh, it was this IP address at this time, he logged into this user, he did this action, and have that complete picture to be able to kind of quickly and easily reverse.
We kind of depend on backups right now a lot of the time, and I hate that. Or we depend on like trying to fish through logs and make those connections using our human brains. All of that is just a really poor solution and I think AI will hopefully help with some of that, and I’m looking forward to having more of this like very specific picture of every action that has on a website without, again, adding a whole bunch of load to the server environment or a whole bunch of data storage requirements that makes it really impossible for organisations to kind of have all this information, right?
Because if I start auditing every action that I’m taking on a website that I have access to, and you think of Pressable having multiple thousands of websites, hosting platforms, you can imagine the amount of data we’d then need to record, right? So data compression becomes super important, or the ability to kind of infer things based on data that we’re seeing becomes important. The amount of work that I do in like looking through logs would make your eyes kind of pop out of your head. It’s brutal sometimes. And logs have never been very user friendly.
So again, another area that AI has been helping us with is like, okay, pull out the things that are potentially the most impactful, the most interesting, the things that stand out over like a statistics, probability kind of system.
[00:23:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think what’s really curious about everything that you’ve just said is, so there’s this kind of impression for people who are just casual users of WordPress that you go to a hosting company, it’s a bunch of files and it’s a database, how hard can it be?
And then you’ve just given us a bit of a window into, well, this is how hard it can be, because there’s so many scenarios. And the typical mom and pop store where, like you said, an hour’s downtime might not be the end of the world, and most of the things can be cash and all that kind of thing. Well, that stands in real contrast to the, I don’t know, the gigantic megacorp .com company that’s doing 8,000 transactions every couple of minutes and there’s millions of dollars going through. And there’s just a whole other layer of things going on there.
And so you see the word Pressable and you think, hosting company, pretty straightforward. And I think it’s really interesting that you get an opportunity to come on and say, well, actually, no, there’s this other layer. There’s all this stuff going on in the background. There’s all of this technology. We’re thinking about the future. You know, we’ve got different geographical locations where things are housed, and we’re trying to speed that up so that there are all these different clusters. It sounds complicated, essentially. I’ll boil it down to that.
So I am a Pressable customer and when I go into the Pressable admin, I sort of log in and, you know, I’m presented with the usual array of different options. I would say that there’s more than probably somebody like me is requiring, but there it is anyway. You know, there’s lots of different options for tweaking this, that, and the other thing.
What I’m trying to sort of draw an analogy to is that it can be a little bit overwhelming if your day job isn’t to deal with a website. You log in and, what is this? What does this menu even exist? There’s probably ways of Googling it and finding it out. But I know that in the near future, Pressable is going to be launching sort of like an AI component to the hosting side of things. An MCP, you’ve described it as Pressable’s MCP. And then in parentheses, get AI to do things related to your hosting, whether that’s WooCommerce or WordPress or performance optimisation or whatever it would be.
So this is interesting. And I’m just curious as to how deep are you going to allow the AI to go? We all know that the AI, any AI can hallucinate. So I’m curious as to know what kind of things are you unleashing for the AI? Is it just a case of, okay, I would like the light theme now, please? Or does it penetrate much deeper than that?
[00:26:10] Malcolm Peralty: So it’ll be in phases over the next little while, we’ll unveil these features and what connections that we have. But eventually the expectation is, anything that you could do or click on as a user in the control panel, an AI could also act on and do as well. So a great example that we’ve been giving our agency partners is if you, let’s say, are working on code for a customer’s website, you could say to the AI built into your Visual Studio Code or your GitHub or whatever, hey, spin up another sandbox site, push this code, update the database, pull from production, all the files, and let me know when this is complete.
And the MCP will go and it will spin up a new sandbox site, a new WordPress install, with a new domain name attached to it. It will grab your code and push it up to that website. It’ll go to production and grab the files from the wp-content uploads folder, and sync it over to this new staging site or sandbox site that you’ve asked for. And then it’ll say, hey, by the way, it’s now ready for testing.
And you’ve done this all with natural language as a command behind the scenes. Or, let’s say you’re running a thousand sites, tell me all the websites that need like a Gravity Forms plugin update. And it will go and it’ll check all of your websites in the Pressable platform and give you a list of like, hey, here are the ones with Gravity Forms updates. And you could say, okay, update them for me please. And it’ll go back and it’ll do that job.
[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess the goal is to make it straightforward to use natural language to do a variety of tasks. Now obviously there’s got to be some serious guardrails around this because, you know, it would be very easy to inadvertently type, delete all of my, that’s a bad example but you get point. You know, what are the contraints?
[00:27:43] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, please don’t use dangerously skip permissions, for example. So a lot of the AI tools that already exist have some human in the loop questioning. Are you sure you want me to do this? Are you sure you want me to do this kind of thing? And kind of seek their approval. We’re also talking about what, if anything, we’re really going to do on our side about that? We have pretty solid backup solutions put in place. So maybe if you, you know, accidentally said, clear out all of my platform, and it deleted all of your websites, you could then hopefully say, can you actually restore from backups all of those sites and have it restore from backups all of those sites.
So, you know, we keep hourly backups of database, daily of the WordPress file system, so there is that. Also our main WordPress install is simlinked, which means that you can’t actually change any of the core files. So even if you told it to delete WordPress, it can’t actually do that piece of it. So your WordPress install would still exist, but all your plugins and uploads and database would all be gone. But you could just restore them again using natural language.
So there are some guide rails that we can put in, but at the end of the day like, you’ll be able to connect whatever AI tool you’re using. Maybe you have Ollama with a local AI tool on your computer. Maybe you’re using Claude or Codex or something else. You’ll be able to use any of those AI tools. And so some of it is really on the person using it to put in some of those guardrails and those human and loop things. And I would recommend having a like system prompt that basically says like, before you do anything destructive, check with me first. Not that it won’t automatically do some of that, but it’s just good to have a secondary layer.
[00:29:13] Nathan Wrigley: And how are you exposing these capabilities to, let’s say Claude or whatever it may be? So what does that interaction look like? How is it that certain capabilities are available, but others are maybe not, and so on.
[00:29:25] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, I mean I like to think of an MCP kind of like USB/API for AI. So we’re basically just making those kind of endpoints available to the MCP, or making like those API endpoints available to AI, so that it can undertake things on your behalf. So like our whole control panel is basically APIs all the way down, so to speak. So it’s not very hard to kind of hook those things up.
I think the harder part is making sure that the AI understands what these controls, what these APIs do, what they expect to receive, what they expect to give back, and what that all means. And once all of those kind of definitions are in place, then it’s pretty easy.
[00:30:05] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the curious things for me is being inside, let’s say the Pressable UI where I’m navigating with a mouse and I’m clicking on things, everything is very intentional. You know, I go to a thing, and I do a thing, and I get a prompt to say, are you sure you want to do this thing? And I say, yes. And so it goes. And so every single thing that I do requires an interaction with me.
I suppose, with an AI, you could concatenate a variety of things. Maybe the AI has some sort of misunderstanding along the way, or you type things in such a way that it’s not entirely clear. And then kind of unpicking, okay, what just happened? It’s really easy to unpick that in the UI because you can say to the support rep, well, I did this, and then the site died. Okay, we know what happened there.
Whereas with this cascade of things, which is done with natural language, presumably this is where your logging, that you described earlier, comes in. There isn’t really a question there, but I’m curious as to what that process is. The capacity for many dominoes to fall from just one simple prompt, I suppose as a point of concern for you guys, because you are going to have to be unpicking all of this on the backend when things, which they inevitably will, go wrong.
[00:31:16] Malcolm Peralty: For sure. And I mean this is one of those areas though where we’re ahead of the curve. I think a lot of companies will be adding these kinds of things. But from an AI perspective, I mean, since October or November of last year, we’ve seen the skills and abilities and understanding of the top tier AI tools just jump exponentially. So the number of mistakes or concerns that we have have gone down in that same vein.
Our support team has also been trained up in a lot of these. And we’ve been testing a lot of these MCP pieces for a long time now. So we feel pretty confident that those that enable this and that have a good understanding of what this means and how to use it won’t make too many mistakes or have too many concerns or issues.
You know, again, we’re targeting a lot of our agency partners that are developers that already kind of live and breathe this stuff. So they’re also used to being able to untangle and knot if they tie themselves in one. So I don’t expect someone with their like first WordPress website on Pressable to enable MCP and start using it.
I really think this is most valuable to agencies or companies at scale. You know, if you’re running one website, you probably don’t need this, but if you’re running like 10, 100, 1,000 websites, then this tooling becomes very helpful. Because you can have like a, maybe do it on one site and now then replicate that same thing you just did across all of the sites I manage.
[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t really know how to phrase this question, but I’ll give this a go. At the moment, presumably you have a fairly solid relationship with your customers. You know, if something goes wrong, you log in, you enable the chat widget, you have that conversation. There’s this backwards and forwards, okay, great. And maybe there’s lots of clients that you get that you never have that interaction with.
But I’m just curious how that relationship over time might change with the advent of AI. And what I mean by that is, it’s almost like you’re not talking to humans anymore. And because of that, you start to have a different impression of the company that you are dealing with. Okay, it’s just some sort of AI entity, I don’t need to worry about it so much. Maybe loyalty starts to come into question because there’s no humans there anyway.
So again, it’s very hard to encapsulate what I’m saying, but presumably from a marketing point of view, there has to be some moment at which you say, okay, there’s too much AI now. We’re no longer a bunch of humans presenting ourselves to the world. We just look like a bunch of robots. Do you know what I’m saying there? Does any of that land?
[00:33:34] Malcolm Peralty: It does. I will say, we have those conversations internally. The expectation is always going to be like, when we add a new feature, it’s going to be added for humans first and then added to our AI tooling. But the only way that you can compete in the modern marketplace is to take advantage of some of the tools and opportunities we’ve been given with AI. As difficult as it is, there’s probably a business case, you know, I’m sure there will be businesses that will target people saying like, we don’t use AI for support, we don’t have AI integrations, we’re a completely human business. But I think the difficulty will be like scaling and competing in the modern marketplace.
And like a lot of the agencies we’re talking to are expecting this. They’re pushing us towards this because they’re looking to reduce their time to delivery, right? They want to be able to sit in a coffee shop with a customer, get a brief of the business, give that brief to, you know, an AI tool that transcribes their voice to words, and then have it go through this whole system of setting up a hosting sandbox for the website, set up WordPress, select a theme that matches their expectations, set up the brand colours, and almost have like a proof of concept at the end of a meal with a customer, that was assisted by AI.
And if they can’t do that first step of setting up a sandbox or a staging site for the customer, then we’re not part of that conversation at all. They’re going to go where there is that feature and that functionality, and Pressable won’t be part of that conversation at all.
And as end users, I mean, having AI assist with the things that agencies or higher touchpoint customers need, gives us that flexibility now to be available for the $25 a month customers who actually need the handholding and support from a human that we just couldn’t do otherwise, right? It just doesn’t scale properly at that price point.
So I think this could be advantageous to both sides if it’s used right and done right. But I definitely agree, there’s landmines that we have to kind of be cautious of and avoid, and we have to be very careful about how we apply this. And I think the key thing is always making sure that everything that we do is human first, and then AI enhanced, rather than AI first and human supplemented. It’s just a hard line to walk.
[00:35:37] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting that conversation you’ve just described in the cafe where, by the end of the cup of coffee, you’ve got yourself a website based upon a conversation you were having moments before. The collapse of the timeline there. You know, we used to think that this five minute install was a big thing. Now it’s like the five minute website that’s fully ready to go, you know, or at least some simulation of a website. May not be the finished one but, you know, you’ve got a staging site ready, with a theme that’s adjacent to what you want to do, with some content that might replicate what you want to do. And it all took place in less time than it took you to finish a single coffee. And that’s so interesting. And you have to armour yourself against that.
That raises another question of course, which is how far you, your tentacles go into the website itself. Because traditionally hosting companies really didn’t concern themselves with the website, apart from the fact that the website was available and, you know, we can see what your plugins are and yada, yada. But it does sound like we’re straying into theming, and possible content creation and things like that. So I don’t know if that falls into the roadmap a bit as well.
So maybe there’s a future where you can, with the AI sort of say, I’d like to swap out my theme. It’s Christmas time, give me a Christmas theme. But we’re doing that in the hosting environment. We’re not necessarily having to log into the website. Again, do you sort of see where I’m going with that?
[00:37:03] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, and I foresee for sure, but the integrations with AI that WordPress 7.0 already has, and the discussions for 7.1 make me believe that Pressable’s MCP will be able to talk to WordPress’s AI integration and do that from end to end. So, I mean we could already do it with the MCP, like adjusting database values and stuff like that, but that’s not what I would consider an ideal way of doing this.
But like I said, with the changes that are happening in WordPress Core, I definitely foresee like a complete end-to-end solution. You know, one AI talking to another, who then carries that task forward, reports back to the Pressable MCP and lets us know that theme change is done, those plugin updates are done, the content change is done. And again, all from that initial prompt, you know, maybe in your Visual Studio Code, which is just crazy to me.
[00:37:45] Nathan Wrigley: I am so used to basically not going back to the hosting until there’s a problem. You know, I go to the login URL for the website in question, I log in, I move around the WordPress UI, create a post, publish a post, schedule something, whatever, upload some assets. You get the idea.
And the idea of that not being the modus operandi for everybody will be so interesting, because it’s going to shatter that experience of, you know, you could watch a YouTube video to figure out the thing because everybody does the thing in the same way.
But it feels like we’re heralding a future where no two people are going to have the exact same experience. You know, you may be creating content through a text editor, which then somehow gets uploaded, or the text editor merely creates a prompt, and then the theme is swapped or amended because you’ve typed in some prompt.
So, you know, my UI, my IDE, my text editor, my version of WordPress, maybe I might build my site entirely differently to you. So that’s fascinating and slightly worrying at the same time because, how do you support that? Not just Pressable, but how does the community support it when we’ve got an infinite number of ways to create a blog post?
[00:38:55] Malcolm Peralty: And not just a blog post, but everything.
[00:38:58] Malcolm Peralty: Maybe you say you want this Christmas theme. Maybe it doesn’t select a theme and change the colours, maybe it writes a whole new CSS for the theme you have. Or maybe it writes a whole new theme, or maybe it writes a plugin that automatically switches it around Christmas time. Like it doesn’t have to pull off the shelf from the theme marketplace or the plugin marketplace that already exists. It can create something wholly new and specific for you.
Maybe it writes a whole new block for you, rather than trying to pull together three or four blocks to be able to create the output that you’re looking for. And some of these things for sure are not going to necessarily be super performant or super secure, especially initially, right? Maybe a year or two from now, once the AI is even smarter than it is today, or has a better understanding of WordPress than it does today. Maybe it will kind of think more about security and performance than it does right now. But you’re going to have these people deploying things that are not the ideal outcome, or ideal solution, or ideal anything. It’s just works for them right now.
And it’s funny, I always hear people talk about maintenance, right? How are we going to maintain all this AI code? We, humans are not going to maintain all this AI code. AI is going to maintain and update all this AI code. And so the joke of it is, if you come along and your host comes back to you and says, hey, your website’s running like a dog. You’re not going to spend half a day or a day trying to troubleshoot anymore. You’re just going to say, hey, AI, why is my website running poorly? Fix it or give me a list of things that need to be fixed, or what have you.
I at Pressable am already like using AI to basically write scripts that run through like two dozen WP-CLI commands, another two dozen like database commands, and some like full code searches. Give me a quick report on anything that needs to be optimised, right? So I didn’t write that script from scratch, I didn’t write that code from scratch to do that. I directed an AI to be able to create that for me. And now as the human in loop, I’m interpreting the data that it’s collected, but I can foresee a future very near where I say, hey, AI now interpret all this data you’ve collected and send a summary to the customer on what they need to change or do. Go and act on my behalf and make these changes.
[00:40:49] Nathan Wrigley: That’s so interesting. So there’s a couple of things. The first one is that it feels almost like we’re heralding in a future in which the WordPress UI maybe is not seen by everybody. So a good example would be, I have a Mac. I rarely use the Mac. I use things on the Mac. You know, I’m using a browser. I use a text editor. I use the application that we’re using to record. I’m not really using the Mac. I hope that lands, if you understand what I mean. I switch it on, but the Mac kind of just goes into the background and I use a bunch of things, which, they’re on the screen because I’ve got a Mac.
[00:41:25] Malcolm Peralty: And I would say like 90% of it’s probably a browser at this point, right?
[00:41:28] Nathan Wrigley: Right, right.
[00:41:30] Malcolm Peralty: It’s a website that you go to. You can do Slack in a browser. You can do what we’re doing today in a browser. Pretty much most things that I do live in a browser. There’s very few applications that I actually need to load on my machine day to day because everything can exist in a browser. I think that paradigm will just be for the next generation, or for the transition that’s happening now, the new paradigm will be everything just lives in an AI application. Whether it’s installing your computer or whether it’s also in a browser. It’ll just be AI.
[00:41:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so it is analogous to that. It’s just this idea that the WordPress UI, that’s the only method that anybody has had, maybe that will be something that a bunch of people use, but it won’t be familiar to everybody because there’s no need for it.
And the other thing that you mentioned is, I suppose I would use any of the stuff that you’ve described, but there’s the one caveat. And the one caveat is I have to know that I can walk it back. I have to know that there is a way for me to undo every mistake that I just made because I got carried away. I sat down, got a bit carried away on a Saturday afternoon, made a bunch of tweaks. I really regret it. I want to know that I can go back and unpick that stuff and for it to be a seamless unpicking. So backups, I guess is the most straightforward way of doing that.
[00:42:40] Malcolm Peralty: And audit logs, right? So like one of the things that I’ve done is, in my system instructions, I do put, before you do anything else, backup the file system, backup the database and create a, like a markdown file that’s going to be step by step, everything that was done, everything that you thought so that I can then review it. And that really helps me kind of get an understanding of the tasks it took and maybe why it took them, to help me refine future attempts, right?
So going back to what we’re doing in hosting, like we’re always trying to think through, like you mentioned, everything is very specific and clickable, and we want to make sure that the AI understands exactly kind of what to click on, or what to select. And having that auditing is super important for that.
[00:43:19] Nathan Wrigley: And that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s a human readable or parsable log of everything. Something where, you know, you’ve got millions of data points in the audit log, but I can actually drill down into that in a meaningful way. Because it may be that I only want to undo a portion of what I did. I’m happy with some things, but I would like to go back. An audit log, as you’ve said, it’s fairly mind numbing stuff.
But we are going to be producing so many more amendments if all we have to do is speak because you can easily, you know, imagine it. I want the Christmas theme. No, not that one. Try something else. No, there’s too much red in that. Swap the red for the blue. And Father Christmas, I’d like him on the homepage but, no, a different one. In 12 seconds we’ve got thousands and thousands of things that have happened.
[00:44:06] Malcolm Peralty: I will say though, how much of that do you remember doing manually, right? Like I’ve gotten to the end of that kind of thought process and gone, wait, there was like a theme like two or three themes ago that actually was, a little bit of customisation could have been cool. What was that theme?
Even as a human, I’ve had lapses in memory when I’m quickly producing outcomes where I can’t necessarily roll it back so easily. So at least with an audit log, you’ll have a much better understanding of what was done and when. Human memory is also failable.
[00:44:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I guess it’ll be interesting to see how much of that burden companies like Pressable take on. Like, you mentioned backups, maybe it will become de rigueur for you every few seconds whilst there’s interactions with MCPs. Look, we’re just going to go belt and braces. Every time you do something, which we detect is fairly sizable, we’re just going to take a backup, even though you never asked us to just in case. You know, those kind of things.
And have a UI to surface information so that the audit log is readable and those kind of things. And that’s all ahead of you. So it doesn’t exist moment, but it’ll certainly be things that will need to be tooled and invented in the future, I would’ve imagined.
[00:45:10] Malcolm Peralty: I mean, one of the hard parts, this might be transitioning the conversation a little bit, one of the hard parts is, you mentioned that AI is creating all these artefacts, and now all these potential backups. AI is already like indexing all of these websites and creating a lot of web traffic, and a lot of load on servers, for example. We had a recent instance where an AI bot went to a website and kept on adding different products to the cart and removing them. Well, every time it added a product to a cart was now an uncachable session.
And it did this millions of times over the course of a day. So we were like, okay, we got to block this bot. This is crazy. So we blocked the bot and about like 10 minutes later we start seeing the exact same traffic pattern from a completely different IP address with a completely different user agent. The bot had figured out an end way around our block and was now doing that same task again to try to, I don’t know, understand this website better, right?
The problem is, as an industry, we don’t know how to pass these costs on to customers because they think it’s kind of unfair in a way, right? Like, why should I have to pay for additional storage for all these audit logs and all these backups? For more bandwidth for my website or more resources for my website, to host or send all of my pages to these different AI bots? And it all kind of comes on us where we either have to like comp all of this technical effort that’s existing, or we have to convince clients to be okay with paying for it. And that has been a really interesting change in the dynamic with a hosting partner.
[00:46:24] Nathan Wrigley: That is so interesting. All those hidden costs, all those hidden things going on. Maybe there needs to be a luddite toggle in the UI somewhere where you just disable all of it. I want the WordPress UI, I want to do things manually. This is my preferred way of doing things.
[00:46:38] Malcolm Peralty: Block ChatGPT. Block Claude. I don’t want any of them viewing my website. Forget them.
[00:46:42] Nathan Wrigley: But it will be curious to see if there’s a subset of people who are, as you’ve described, unwilling to pay for that stuff because it’s simply something that they don’t use. They have no anticipation of using. It will be interesting to see if there’s a subset of people.
And also how clever these technologies become to disrupt things like that. You know, malicious actors out there who managed to come up with a million different ways to circuit around the blocks that you put on. And it will be interesting to see if just the cost of being online does rise with the advent of AI.
I mean, certainly the storage of all of these things is certainly going to rise. The conversations with the AI is certainly adding a financial cost. You know, there’s lots of hardware being built at the moment and there’s a cost to that. Certainly isn’t cheap. But whether or not we can cope with that, and whether or not your price points can keep up with that, and whether customers are going to pay for it.
Okay, there we go. That is so interesting. There’s so much stuff to dive into there. We could probably talk for another hour or so, but there we go. So, Malcolm, if anybody wants to reach out to you or learn more about Pressable, I guess, where would we reach out to you? Do you do social media or whatever it may be?
[00:47:51] Malcolm Peralty: I try not to. For Pressable, it’s pressable.com. For myself, I’d prefer you go through my personal website, which is my last name, .com. So peralty.com. And if you do want to get me on social media, honestly, really the only one I’m ever on is LinkedIn and I only kind of connect with people that I actually connect with. And then Twitter or X or whatever it’s called, I passively view from time to time. But honestly, the best other places would be, you know, you could probably find me on one of the WordPress Slack communities, for example, if you’re really interested.
[00:48:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so Peralty, peralty.com. If you are driving a car listening to this and you can’t write it down, then go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Malcolm Peralty in it, we will have all of the links that were suggested and talked about during this episode right on the episode show notes. So, Malcolm, thank you so much for chatting to me today and peeling back the curtain a little bit on the hosting over at Pressable. Thank you.
[00:48:42] Malcolm Peralty: I appreciate it. Appreciate it so much. Thank you for having me.
Malcolm has been immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for nearly 20 years, starting out as a full-time blogger and working his way through tech roles in project management, agencies, and even a stint in the Drupal space. These days, Malcolm is bringing his experience back to WordPress, serving as a technical account manager at Pressable, a managed WordPress hosting company.
Malcolm shares how he found his way from early forays with WordPress to managing large-scale hosting environments. He talks about the lure of the Drupal world, and why he ultimately returned to WordPress and Pressable.
We discuss what technical account management means at Pressable, how his role differs from sales and support, focusing instead on long-term strategy for clients, performance optimisation, and bridging the gap between customer needs, and the underlying WP Cloud infrastructure. We hear how Pressable proactively helps clients, sometimes even advising them to downgrade their plans if optimisations mean they need fewer resources.
We go behind the scenes in Pressable, getting into how hardware considerations, plugin bloat, WooCommerce or LMS sites, and customer hand-holding all come together inside one company. Malcolm gives us a candid look at performance challenges, the ways hosts interact with infrastructure teams, and why education around WordPress performance is so tough, even as competing platforms prioritise speed at all costs.
We also look to the future. What are the cutting-edge trends in hosting, like database replication, virtual clusters, and especially the rise of AI within the hosting experience. Malcolm explains Pressable’s upcoming MCP, an AI-powered control panel that promises to let you deploy and manage WordPress sites using natural language. We explore how AI will impact everything from customer support to site deployment, potential pitfalls, and the challenge of balancing automation with human relationships.
If you’re curious about the state of managed WordPress hosting today, the interplay of tech, support, and AI, or just want to know what’s happening behind the curtain, this episode is for you.
From Curiosity to Contribution — How WordPress Helped Me Build a Career, Confidence, and Global Opportunities
Introduction
Every journey begins with a small step, often driven by curiosity rather than clarity. My journey into technology was not planned. It started with a simple question: What should I learn?
Coming from a small village with limited exposure to computers, I never imagined that one day I would be part of a global community and attend an international event like WordCamp Asia .
My path was not traditional. I did not come from a technical background, nor did I have a clear roadmap. But what I did have was curiosity, determination, and the willingness to learn .
Over time, that curiosity turned into skills, those skills turned into a career, and that career connected me to a global community through WordPress .
This is the story of how WordPress became the source of my satisfaction and joy .
Early Life and Education
I come from a small village, where opportunities in technology were limited. For higher education, I moved to the city of Rajkot .
Like many students, I followed a traditional academic path and completed my Bachelor of Science in Chemistry.
However, after completing my degree, I felt uncertain about my future . Chemistry was my subject, but it was not my passion.
That is when I decided to learn computers .
Starting My Computer Journey
In 2009, I enrolled in a Computer Engineering course. Everything was new to me—programming, logic, and technical concepts.
It was not easy, especially coming from a non-technical background. But I was determined to learn .
I joined a 3-month training program but completed only 1.5 months. At that point, I had a choice:
Wait… or take a risk.
I chose to take a risk .
I applied for a job—and I was selected as a PHP Web Developer .
That moment changed my life.
Building a Career in PHP
For the next five years, I worked as a Core PHP Developer.
Then one day, everything changed.
My boss said: “Add content to the WordPress post sidebar.”
I was shocked .
I didn’t know WordPress.
But I didn’t give up.
I searched, learned, and completed the task .
That one moment changed my direction forever.
Discovering WordPress
As I explored WordPress, I realized its true power.
With less code, we could build faster, better, and smarter websites .
In 2015, I decided to focus fully on WordPress.
And that decision changed my life.
Choosing Independence
In 2018, I took another big step—I left my job.
I started working remotely as a WordPress Developer .
It was risky… but it gave me freedom .
Freedom to work globally. Freedom to grow. Freedom to dream bigger.
Becoming a Contributor
I developed and published two plugins in the WordPress repository—Contact Information Widget and Shital Quiz Cloner for LearnDash.
Seeing people use my work gave me deep satisfaction .
I started contributing to Core, Meta, and Polyglots.
I became a Core and Meta Contributor in WordPress.
I have contributed to multiple WordPress releases, including:
4.9 “Tipton”
4.9.5 Security and Maintenance Release
5.0 “Bebo”
5.1 “Betty”
5.2 “Jaco”
5.3 “Kirk”
5.4 “Adderley”
5.5 “Eckstine”
5.6 “Simone”
5.7 “Esperanza”
5.8 “Tatum”
5.9 “Josephine”
6.0 “Arturo”
6.6 “Dorsey”
I was also honored to be part of the Women Squad for WordPress 5.6 Release Planning.
Seeing my name “Shital Marakana” in Design, Tech, and Lead was an unforgettable moment .
WordCamp Experiences in India
My first WordCamp in Mumbai was an amazing experience .
I realized something important:
WordPress is not just about code… It is about people .
I attended WordCamps in Mumbai, Nagpur, and Ahmedabad.
Each one helped me grow.
The Dream of WordCamp Asia
WordCamp Asia was my dream .
But financially, it was difficult.
So I watched live streams I learned online I stayed inspired
This was not just my journey—it became our journey.
Volunteering at WordCamp Asia
Volunteering was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life .
I worked with people from around the world .
At the end, I received my volunteer certificate .
It was not just a certificate.
It was a symbol of my journey.
What WordCamp Asia Gave Me
Did it give me financial freedom? Not immediately.
Did it give me community? Yes .
Did it give me global exposure? Absolutely .
But most importantly—
It gave me direction.
Conclusion
When I look back at my journey, it feels like a story of courage, belief, and growth .
WordPress started as curiosity… But it became my identity.
From a small village to a global stage — this journey changed me.
There were doubts. There were fears. But I kept going .
And WordCamp Asia became my turning point.
It didn’t just give me results— it gave me direction.
It didn’t just give me success— it gave me possibility.
It didn’t just change my present— it shaped my future.
WordPress gave me confidence. It gave me a voice. It gave me a community .
And today, I know—
It is not just what I do—it is who I have become, and who I am still becoming.
એક નાના ગામથી વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયા સુધી: મારી વર્ડપ્રેસ સફર
શીતલને તેના પોતાના અવાજમાં તેનો નિબંધ વાંચતા સાંભળો!
જિજ્ઞાસાથી કોન્ટ્રીબ્યુશન સુધી — વર્ડપ્રેસે કેવી રીતે મને કારકિર્દી, આત્મવિશ્વાસ અને વૈશ્વિક તકો આપી
પરિચય
દરેક સફર એક નાના પગલાથી શરૂ થાય છે, ઘણીવાર સ્પષ્ટતા કરતાં જિજ્ઞાસાથી પ્રેરિત થાય છે. મારી ટેક્નોલોજીની સફર પણ એવી જ હતી — કોઈ પ્લાન નહોતો, માત્ર એક સવાલ હતો: મારે શું શીખવું જોઈએ?
એક નાના ગામમાંથી આવું છું જ્યાં કોમ્પ્યુટરનો ઉપયોગ ખૂબ જ ઓછો થાય છે, મેં ક્યારેય કલ્પના પણ નહોતી કરી કે એક દિવસ હું વૈશ્વિક સમુદાયનો ભાગ બનીશ અને વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયા જેવા આંતરરાષ્ટ્રીય કાર્યક્રમમાં હાજરી આપીશ.
મારો માર્ગ પરંપરાગત નહોતો. હું ટેકનિકલ બેકગ્રાઉન્ડમાંથી આવી ન હતી, કે મારી પાસે સ્પષ્ટ રોડમેપ નહોતો. પરંતુ મારી પાસે જે હતું તે જિજ્ઞાસા, નિશ્ચય અને શીખવાની ઇચ્છા હતી.
સમય જતાં, આ જિજ્ઞાસા ધીમે ધીમે કૌશલ્ય બની, કૌશલ્ય કારકિર્દી બની, અને કારકિર્દી મને વર્ડપ્રેસ સમુદાય સાથે જોડતી ગઈ
આ વાર્તા છે કે કેવી રીતે વર્ડપ્રેસ મારા સંતોષ અને આનંદનો સ્ત્રોત બન્યો.
પ્રારંભિક જીવન અને શિક્ષણ
હું એક નાના ગામડામાંથી આવું છું, જ્યાં ટેકનોલોજીમાં તકો મર્યાદિત હતી. ઉચ્ચ શિક્ષણ માટે, હું રાજકોટ શહેરમાં રહેવા ગઈ.
ઘણા વિદ્યાર્થીઓની જેમ, મેં પણ પરંપરાગત શૈક્ષણિક માર્ગ અપનાવ્યો અને રસાયણશાસ્ત્રમાં વિજ્ઞાનની સ્નાતક ડિગ્રી પૂર્ણ કરી.
જોકે, મારી ડિગ્રી પૂર્ણ કર્યા પછી, મને મારા ભવિષ્ય વિશે અનિશ્ચિતતા અનુભવાઈ. રસાયણશાસ્ત્ર મારો વિષય હતો, પણ તે મારો શોખ નહોતો.
ત્યારે જ મેં કોમ્પ્યુટર શીખવાનું નક્કી કર્યું .
કમ્પ્યુટર સફરની શરૂઆત
૨૦૦૯ માં, મેં કમ્પ્યુટર એન્જિનિયરિંગના કોર્ષમાં પ્રવેશ મેળવ્યો. મારા માટે બધું જ નવું હતું – પ્રોગ્રામિંગ, લોજિક અને ટેકનિકલ ખ્યાલો.
તે સરળ નહોતું, ખાસ કરીને નોન-ટેકનિકલ પૃષ્ઠભૂમિમાંથી. પરંતુ હું શીખવા માટે મક્કમ હતી.
હું ૩ મહિનાના તાલીમ કાર્યક્રમમાં જોડાઈ પણ માત્ર ૧.૫ મહિનામાં જ પૂર્ણ કરી લીધું. તે સમયે, મારી પાસે એક વિકલ્પ હતો:
રાહ જોવી… કે રિસ્ક લેવુ?
મેં રિસ્ક લેવાનું પસંદ કર્યું.
મેં નોકરી માટે અરજી કરી – અને મારી PHP વેબ ડેવલપર તરીકે પસંદગી થઈ.
તે ક્ષણે મારું જીવન બદલી નાખ્યું.
PHP માં કારકિર્દી બનાવવી
આગામી પાંચ વર્ષ સુધી, મેં કોર PHP ડેવલપર તરીકે કામ કર્યું.
પછી એક દિવસ, બધું બદલાઈ ગયું.
એક દિવસ મારા બોસે કહ્યું: “વર્ડપ્રેસ સાઈટ માં પોસ્ટ સાઇડબારમાં કન્ટેન્ટ ઉમેરો.”
હું ચોંકી ગઈ.
મને વર્ડપ્રેસ આવડતું નહોતું.
પણ મેં હાર ના માની.
સર્ચ કર્યું, શીખ્યું, અને કામ પૂર્ણ કર્યું
એ એક કામે મારી દિશા બદલી દીધી.
વર્ડપ્રેસની શોધ
વર્ડપ્રેસ શીખતા શીખતા સમજાયું કે આ ખૂબ પાવરફુલ પ્લેટફોર્મ છે.
ઓછા કોડ સાથે, આપણે ઝડપી, વધુ સારી અને સ્માર્ટ વેબસાઇટ બનાવી શકીએ છીએ.
૨૦૧૫ માં, મેં વર્ડપ્રેસ પર સંપૂર્ણ ધ્યાન કેન્દ્રિત કરવાનું નક્કી કર્યું. અને તે નિર્ણયથી મારું જીવન બદલાઈ ગયું.
સ્વતંત્રતાની પસંદગી
૨૦૧૮ માં, મેં બીજું એક મોટું પગલું ભર્યું – મેં મારી નોકરી છોડી દીધી.
મેં વર્ડપ્રેસ ડેવલપર તરીકે રિમોટલી કામ કરવાનું શરૂ કર્યું.
તે જોખમી હતું… પણ તેનાથી મને સ્વતંત્રતા મળી.
વૈશ્વિક સ્તરે કામ કરવાની સ્વતંત્રતા.
વિકાસ કરવાની સ્વતંત્રતા.
મોટા સ્વપ્ન જોવાની સ્વતંત્રતા.
Contributor બનવું
મેં વર્ડપ્રેસ રિપોઝીટરીમાં બે પ્લગઇન્સ બનાવ્યા: Contact Information Widget Shital Quiz Cloner for LearnDash
મારા plugins નો ઉપયોગ લોકો કરે છે — એ જોવું ખૂબ સંતોષકારક હતું.
મેં Core, Meta, Polyglots માં યોગદાન આપવાનું શરૂ કર્યું.
વર્ડપ્રેસ 5.6 રિલીઝ પ્લાનિંગ માટે મહિલા સ્ક્વોડનો ભાગ બનવાનું મને પણ સન્માન મળ્યું.
ડિઝાઇન, ટેક અને લીડમાં મારું નામ “શીતલ મારકણા” જોવું એ એક અવિસ્મરણીય ક્ષણ હતી.
અને મને વર્ડપ્રેસ 5.6 રિલીઝ પ્લાનિંગ માટે મહિલા સ્ક્વોડમાં પસંદ થવાનો ગર્વ મળ્યો.
ભારતમાં વર્ડકેમ્પના અનુભવો
મુંબઈમાં મારો પહેલો વર્ડકેમ્પ એક અદ્ભુત અનુભવ હતો.
મને સમજાયું — વર્ડપ્રેસ ફક્ત કોડ નથી… એ કોમ્યુનિટી છે.
મેં મુંબઈ, નાગપુર અને અમદાવાદના વર્ડકેમ્પમાં હાજરી આપી.
દરેકે મને વિકાસ કરવામાં મદદ કરી.
વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયાનું સપનું
વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયા મારું સ્વપ્ન હતું .
પરંતુ આર્થિક રીતે, તે મુશ્કેલ હતું.
તેથી મેં લાઇવ સ્ટ્રીમ્સ જોઈ
મેં ઓનલાઈન શીખ્યું
પ્રેરણા જાળવી રાખી
અને મેં રાહ જોઈ…
સપનાનું સાકાર થવું
આખરે સપનું પૂરું થયું
મને વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયામાં volunteer તરીકે પસંદ કરવામાં આવી.
અને મને ઝીલ ઠક્કર શિષ્યવૃત્તિ પણ મળી.
સૌથી ખાસ વાત?
મેં મારા પરિવાર સાથે હાજરી આપી.
મારા પતિએ મને સાથ આપ્યો.
મારા 4 વર્ષના પુત્ર, મંત્રએ દરેક ક્ષણનો આનંદ માણ્યો.
આ ફક્ત મારી સફર નહોતી – તે અમારી સફર બની ગઈ.
વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયામાં Volunteer
Volunteer મારા જીવનના સૌથી અર્થપૂર્ણ અનુભવોમાંનો એક હતો.
મેં વિશ્વભરના લોકો સાથે કામ કર્યું.
અંતે, મને મારું volunteer પ્રમાણપત્ર મળ્યું.
એ ફક્ત પ્રમાણપત્ર નહોતું — એ મારી સફરની ઓળખ હતી.
વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયાએ મને શું આપ્યું?
શું તેણે મને નાણાકીય સ્વતંત્રતા આપી? તરત નહીં.
શું તેણે મને community આપી?
હા.
શું તેણે મને વૈશ્વિક સ્તરે એક્સપોઝર આપ્યો?
ચોક્કસ.
પણ સૌથી મહત્વનું—
દિશા આપી.
નિષ્કર્ષ
જ્યારે હું મારી સફર પર પાછળ ફરીને જોઉં છું, ત્યારે તે હિંમત, વિશ્વાસ અને વિકાસની વાર્તા જેવું લાગે છે.
વર્ડપ્રેસ એક જિજ્ઞાસાથી શરૂ થયું…
પણ એ મારી ઓળખ બની ગયું.
નાના ગામથી વૈશ્વિક મંચ સુધી,
આ સફરે મને બદલાવી દીધી.
શંકા હતી.
ડર હતો.
પણ હું અટકી નહીં
વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયા મારા જીવનનો turning point બન્યો.
તેણે મને ફક્ત પરિણામો જ આપ્યા નહીં—
તેણે મને દિશા આપી.
તે માત્ર સફળતા નથી આપી—
તે સંભાવના આપી.
તેણે ફક્ત મારા વર્તમાનને જ બદલ્યો નહીં—
તેણે મારા ભવિષ્યને આકાર આપ્યો.
વર્ડપ્રેસે મને આત્મવિશ્વાસ આપ્યો. તેણે મને અવાજ આપ્યો. તેણે મને એક community આપી.
અને આજે હું જાણું છું—આ ફક્ત હું શું કરું છું એ નથી—આ હું કોણ બની ગઈ છું, અને આગળ શું બની રહી છું તેની સફર છે.
एक छोटे से गांव से WordCamp Asia तक: मेरी WordPress यात्रा
शीतल को अपना निबंध अपनी ही आवाज़ में पढ़ते हुए सुनें!
जिज्ञासा से योगदान तक — कैसे WordPress ने मुझे करियर, आत्मविश्वास और वैश्विक अवसर दिए
परिचय
हर सफ़र एक छोटे कदम से शुरू होता है, जो अक्सर क्लैरिटी के बजाय क्यूरिऑसिटी से इंस्पायर्ड होता है। मेरा टेक्नोलॉजी के साथ सफ़र भी ऐसा ही था — कोई प्लान नहीं था, बस एक सवाल था: मुझे क्या सीखना चाहिए?
एक छोटे से गाँव से आने के कारण जहाँ कंप्यूटर का इस्तेमाल बहुत कम होता था, मैंने कभी नहीं सोचा था कि एक दिन मैं एक ग्लोबल कम्युनिटी का हिस्सा बनूंगी और WordCamp Asia जैसे इंटरनेशनल इवेंट में शामिल होऊंगी।
मेरा रास्ता ट्रेडिशनल नहीं था। मैं किसी टेक्निकल बैकग्राउंड से नहीं थी, न ही मेरे पास कोई क्लियर रोडमैप था। लेकिन मेरे पास जो था वह थी क्यूरिऑसिटी, डिटरमिनेशन और सीखने की इच्छा ।
समय के साथ, यह क्यूरिऑसिटी धीरे-धीरे एक स्किल में बदल गई, एक स्किल करियर में बदल गई, और एक करियर ने मुझे WordPress कम्युनिटी से जोड़ा।
यह कहानी है कि कैसे WordPress मेरे सैटिस्फैक्शन और खुशी का सोर्स बन गया ।
प्रारंभिक जीवन और शिक्षा
मैं एक छोटे से गांव से हूं, जहां टेक्नोलॉजी में मौके कम थे। हायर एजुकेशन के लिए मैं राजकोट शहर चली गई।
कई स्टूडेंट्स की तरह, मैंने भी ट्रेडिशनल एकेडमिक रास्ता अपनाया और केमिस्ट्री में बैचलर ऑफ़ साइंस की डिग्री पूरी की।
लेकिन, अपनी डिग्री पूरी करने के बाद, मुझे अपने भविष्य को लेकर पक्का नहीं लग रहा था। केमिस्ट्री मेरा सब्जेक्ट था, लेकिन यह मेरा पैशन नहीं था।
तभी मैंने कंप्यूटर सीखने का फैसला किया।
कंप्यूटर यात्रा की शुरुआत
2009 में, मैंने कंप्यूटर इंजीनियरिंग कोर्स में एडमिशन लिया। मेरे लिए सब कुछ नया था – प्रोग्रामिंग, लॉजिक और टेक्निकल कॉन्सेप्ट।
यह आसान नहीं था, खासकर नॉन-टेक्निकल बैकग्राउंड से होने के कारण। लेकिन मैंने सीखने का पक्का इरादा कर लिया था।
मैंने 3 महीने का ट्रेनिंग प्रोग्राम जॉइन किया लेकिन उसे सिर्फ़ 1.5 महीने में पूरा कर लिया। उस समय, मेरे पास एक चॉइस थी:
इंतज़ार करें… या रिस्क लें?
मैंने रिस्क लेने का फैसला किया।
मैंने नौकरी के लिए अप्लाई किया – और मैं PHP वेब डेवलपर के तौर पर चुन ली गई।
उस पल ने मेरी ज़िंदगी बदल दी।
PHP में करियर बनाना
अगले पांच सालों तक मैंने कोर PHP डेवलपर के तौर पर काम किया।
फिर एक दिन सब कुछ बदल गया।
एक दिन मेरे बॉस ने कहा: “WordPress साइट में पोस्ट साइडबार में कंटेंट डालदो।”
मैं चौंक गई।
मैं वर्डप्रेस नहीं जानती थी।
लेकिन मैंने हार नहीं मानी।
खोजा, सीखा और काम पूरा किया।
उस एक चीज़ ने मेरी दिशा बदल दी।
वर्डप्रेस खोज
वर्डप्रेस सीखते समय मुझे एहसास हुआ कि यह बहुत पावरफुल प्लेटफार्म है।
कम कोड के साथ, हम तेज़, बेहतर और स्मार्ट वेबसाइट बना सकते हैं।
2015 में, मैंने पूरी तरह से वर्डप्रेस पर फोकस करने का फैसला किया। और उस फैसले ने मेरी ज़िंदगी बदल दी।
स्वतंत्रता का विकल्प
2018 में, मैंने एक और बड़ा कदम उठाया – मैंने अपनी नौकरी छोड़ दी।
मैंने वर्डप्रेस डेवलपर के तौर पर रिमोटली काम करना शुरू कर दिया।
यह रिस्की था… लेकिन इसने मुझे आज़ादी दी।
ग्लोबल लेवल पर काम करने की आज़ादी।
ग्रो करने की आज़ादी।
बड़े सपने देखने की आज़ादी।
कंट्रीब्यूटर बनना
मैंने वर्डप्रेस रिपॉजिटरी में दो प्लगइन्स बनाए: Contact Information Widget Shital Quiz Cloner for LearnDash
लोगों को मेरे काम का इस्तेमाल करते देखना बहुत अच्छा लगा।
मैंने कोर, मेटा, पॉलीग्लॉट्स में योगदान देना शुरू कर दिया।
In this episode, co-hosts discuss WooCommerce automation with expert James Collins, emphasizing how tools like Zapier streamline tasks, reduce errors, and enhance efficiency through practical automation examples and AI advancements.
Studio’s sync has been delightful, but still there is a need for “only site editing related sync” option, as you may lose some content if you mess with pull-push ( writing a post on production, not pulling, and then pushing a change you did with the site editor with local ( via database). I may open a PR.
So, to start the “redesign”, I opened the Studio app, clicked on add site and pulled this existing site.
Once that was done, I shared the site folder with Claude desktop and wrote my specs as user stories. Told it about myself, shared my LinkedIn profile, social media and, most important, my public work on GitHub (closed PRs in Gutenberg, wordpress-develop, and SCF).
A bit of testing, some copy changes, small fixes, and then Sync → Push.
Et voilà. Site done. Could be better, still good enough for a personal blog.
WordPress is software with limitless potential and a mission to make publishing accessible to the whole world. Boston is a city with prolific, world-renowned universities, vibrant tech communities, and an incredible spirit. One of the reasons why I help organize this meetup is because I have seen first-hand the opportunities it creates for attendees when these groups come together.
While I look forward to our meetups each and every month, our speaker lineup for April has me even more excited than usual. If you’ve been meaning to attend a WordPress Boston meetup event and just haven’t gotten around to it, this is the month you should finally make it happen.
Event Details
Date: April 27, 2026 Time: 6:30PM-9:00PM Location: Microsoft New England Research and Development (NERD) Center 1 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142
I checked my email one day last September to find a new post from Ethan Marcotte’s journal. He wrote about how he was looking for his next endeavor having just finished a project with the City of Boston where he helped the Digital Services team define a new design system. I realized I had forgotten that he was based in Boston.
Anyone and everyone is welcome to speak at our meetups so long as the topic is useful in some way to those who use or build with WordPress (submit a talk proposal if you think that’s you)! While we occasionally have speakers from out of town when logistics line up right, it’s very important to me that the meetup is a platform for celebrating and showcasing the amazing talents from the greater Boston area. The organizing team regularly performs outreach to individuals who we feel can offer valuable insight to the attendees of our meetup. I’m someone who tends to aim high. The worst case scenario: you don’t receive an answer or they politely decline.
I reached out through his website’s contact form and I’m glad I did! After a bit of coordination and planning, we landed on April’s meetup for him to give his talk The design systems between us.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Ethan, here’s a bit more about him.
WordPress 7.0 and Beyond
While featuring local talent is important to the organizing team, another factor that we’re always trying to balance in our programming is bringing in leaders from outside of the Bay State. Again aiming high, I reached out to Mary Hubbard about having her speak at our meetup. As the Executive Director of the WordPress Project, there’s few people in a better position to present about where WordPress is going and the impact it will have on creators and local businesses.
After some back and forth, April also ended up as the best month to fit our meetup into her busy schedule. Meetups are a critical part of the overall WordPress equation and one of the reasons why it has grown to the Open Source giant it is today. We’re grateful for her willingness to attend our meetup to engage with our community by talking about what the 7.0 release mans for the project, and how community events like our meetup can play a role in the next 20 years of WordPress.
I am just back from my fourth WordCamp Asia and it was again fantastic! I also enjoyed Mumbai as a city to visit. The energy in the streets, the kindness of the people, the historic sites of many cultures and the deliciousness of the food. It was all an adventure!
Huge Kudos to all the people who put together a phenomenal WordCamp. It’s a lot of work, and it takes dedication, perseverance and an incredible amount of details to bring it all together for ca 2300 people to have a good time. And I am excited for next year to revisit India for the first WordCamp India as a fourth flagship event.
The angels behind the scenes already uploaded all 48 session videos to YouTube to the WordCamp Asia 2026 playlist on the WordPress channel.
And just in time for this Weekend Edition, WordCamp Europe announced their schedule, with two tracks for talks and two for workshops. In a few weeks, on June 4-6, 2026, roughly 1500 people will descend on Krakow, Poland. Will you be there?
If you would rather not get across the pond, there are a few WordCamps on the calendar in the US, too:
What else is in this Weekend Edition? AI in WordPress, block theme and plugin updates and more…
Have fun!
Yours, Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Miguel Fonseca recaps what’s new in Gutenberg 22.9, a focused release across 131 merged PRs. The headline addition is background gradient support for the Group block, letting you layer gradients over background images for the first time. The command palette gains organized sections for recent commands and contextual suggestions — experimental, opt-in via Gutenberg Experiments. Real-time collaboration gets stability fixes: block notes now sync without a page refresh, and the stuck “Join” button in the post list is resolved.
Anne McCarthy introduces the Twenty Twenty-Seven team: Henrique Iamarino leads design, with Maggie Cabrera and Carolina Nymark as co-lead developers. The standout addition is Juanfra Aldasoro stepping into a newly created lead mentor role — a deliberate move to make theme contribution more structured and welcoming for newer contributors. Starting earlier than previous default theme cycles gives the team room to be more intentional: the goal isn’t just a great theme, but growing the number of people who feel capable of contributing to WordPress theme work at all.
WordPress 7.0
The release date is still pending. An update is expected on or before April 22, 2026, next week. Stay tuned.
Benjamin Zekavica, previous Core team rep, offers a practical pre-flight checklist to prepare your plugins and sites for WordPress 7.0: if your plugins still use metaboxes, real-time collaboration will silently break for your users — migration time is now. PHP 7.2 and 7.3 are gone, MySQL minimum jumps to 8.0, and API keys in the new Connectors screen sit unencrypted in wp_options until Trac #64789 lands, so use environment variables instead. The iframed editor isn’t enforced in 7.0 core yet, but test your v2 blocks in the Gutenberg plugin today.
Core AI team member Darin Kotter cuts through the noise in WP 7.0 + AI: WordPress 7.0 ships AI infrastructure, not AI features. Your site won’t suddenly start firing off AI requests when you update. What lands in core are the provider-agnostic AI Client PHP API, the new Connectors API for managing external service authentication, and client-side enhancements to the Abilities API. Actual AI providers, features, and MCP integration all arrive via separate plugins — your choice, your setup.
Nevertheless, Depak Gupta,freelance developer from Mumbai and contributor on the Core AI team, published a plugin to Turn of all AI Features via the Settings > General page or via command line.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Jamie Marsland poses an interesting question in The future of WordPress after blocks: what if the builder isn’t human? He suggests that blocks were made for people—easy to understand but difficult for AI to interpret. He envisions a future where meaning is more important than layout, editing becomes conversations, and WordPress transforms from a site builder to a content operating system.
Shani Banerjee highlights the new features in WooCommerce 10.7, mainly focusing on performance boosts: improvements on the high-performance order storage (HPOS) reduce the number of database queries by 51%, and using object cache significantly cuts down checkout query counts. There are also updated analytics export filters that accurately reflect currency for background jobs, a new beta PHP API for handling orders, fixes for the Cart and Checkout blocks, better contrast for accessibility, and increased security for order notes in the REST API and AJAX handlers. Banerjee has all the salient details for you.
Speaking of WooCommerce, Wes Theron walks you through the new course, Build your store with WooCommerce on WordPress.com. It’s free and beginner-friendly. You’ll learn everything you need to launch and manage an online store. In about an hour of bite-size video lessons, you’ll work through products, payments, shipping, taxes, and order management at your own pace, ending with a fully functional store and the confidence to run it day to day.
Derek Hanson‘s Cover Block Parallax Style v1.2.0is more bug-fix than feature release. The most visible fix: the editor and frontend were using different default speeds, so what you previewed wasn’t what visitors saw. Two mobile-handling bugs got squashed — the original global viewport check meant parallax would never initialize after resizing from mobile to desktop. The main new feature is a per-block “Disable on mobile” toggle, replacing the blunt all-or-nothing approach. Background oversizing also bumped from 130% to 140%, matching what production parallax libraries use.
Elliott Richmond continues his WordPress.com series with Design Your WordPress Homepage with Twenty Twenty-Five, switching to the core theme he contributed to and building a hero section, call to action, and quick links grid — properly, using blocks the way they were designed. In 12 minutes you’ll learn how Groups, Covers, Grids, Global Styles, and Patterns fit together, and why understanding what’s happening under the hood makes all the difference to your layouts.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
At WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai, I ran a block theme development workshop and whether you were there or couldn’t get a seat, the full workshop bundle is now on GitHub— everything you need to build Concrete & Light, a portfolio theme, entirely through the Site Editor. Three guided exercises walk you through styling headers and footers, setting global element styles, and creating dynamic page and archive templates. You can be up and running in minutes via WordPress Studio, the Studio CLI, or directly in WordPress Playground.
Jonathan Bossenger documents how he built a custom WordPress block theme using Claude and MCP tools— no CLI, no code editor, just conversation. WordPress.com MCP tools let Claude audit his live site directly; WordPress Studio MCP tools wrote the theme files into his local environment. The key lesson: AI got him 80% there fast, but converting Claude’s raw HTML output into proper editable block markup still required a human in the loop — and Claude Code to help get it done.
Yann Collet, founder of Twentig, has launched Twentig One, a new free WordPress block theme built for the site editor. Lightweight and flexible, it offers templates, post formats, color presets, font pairings, and fluid spacing out of the box. Four starter sites — Business, Portfolio, Blog, and Personal — get you up and running quickly, with more on the way.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2025” A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly.
Eric Karkovack walks you through using the Remote Data Blocks plugin to pull Google Sheets data into WordPress, step by step. The plugin connects to Airtable, Shopify, and Google Sheets out of the box, with HTTP support for other sources. Most of the setup time goes into Google Cloud Platform — creating a project, enabling APIs, and generating JSON credentials. Once connected, your spreadsheet data renders via a block and a customizable pattern directly in the editor.
Varun Dubey shares a hard-won lesson in CLAUDE.md for WordPress Developers: Why Layered Knowledge Beats a Bigger File: when your instructions file hits 400 lines, more rules aren’t the fix. His solution is four distinct layers — rules in CLAUDE.md, facts in memory, procedures in skills, and capabilities in MCP servers — each loaded only when relevant. For WordPress developers already running Claude Code and feeling the weight of their own instructions pile up, this is the cleanup framework you didn’t know you needed.
AI and WordPress
Jeffrey Paul announces two quick releases of the WordPress AI plugin. Version 0.6.0 marked a shift toward connected publishing workflows — image editing and refinement landed as a full Feature, and the plugin was renamed from “AI Experiments” to simply “AI.” Now 0.7.0 is out, expanding editorial workflows further: Content Classification suggests categories and tags from your post content, Meta Description Generation handles SEO descriptions without leaving the editor, and bulk alt text generation lets you process your entire Media Library at once. Your next stop is 0.8.0, where Content Provenance tracking via C2PA and a “Refine from Notes” experiment are already taking shape.
James LePage, co-team rep of WordPress Core AI and head of AI at Automattic, catalogs what the community is building on top of the WordPress AI infrastructure ahead of 7.0. The volume is the point: ten community AI provider plugins, 70+ plugins adopting the Abilities API covering hundreds of millions of installs, dozens of MCP server implementations, fourteen agent skills, and tutorials in Japanese, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. WooCommerce, ACF, Ninja Forms, GravityKit, Yoast, and WP Engine are all in. None of it was dictated from the top — the community decided the building blocks were worth using. The post has about 180+ distinct resources and links. And LePage himself admits it’s not exhaustive.
JuanMa Garrido shares hard-won lessons in Using local AI models with WordPress 7.0: what I learned connecting Ollama — the kind the official docs skip. The biggest gotcha: call wp_ai_client_prompt() at init priority 25 or later, not the default 10, or authentication won’t be wired up yet and you’ll get a silent “No models found.” He also covers how to allowlist localhost requests (blocked by WordPress’s SSRF protection by default), register fallback auth for keyless local providers, and use is_supported_for_text_generation() as a pre-flight check before committing to an API call.
Gary Pendergast brings his AI writing experiment directly into the block editor with Claudaborative Editing 0.4. The new WordPress plugin — available on GitHub now, pending directory approval — adds a sidebar menu with Compose, Proofread, Review, Edit, and Translate modes, plus a pre-publish panel that suggests tags, categories, and excerpts. You control how much the LLM does: it can fix things outright or just leave notes for you to act on. Gary uses it mainly for planning — to organize his thoughts before writing, not to write for him.
What’s new in Playground?
Fellyph Cintra announces a new blueprint agent skill that teaches your coding agent to write valid WordPress Playground Blueprintsfrom natural language prompts. Install it with one npx command and your agent gains a structured reference covering every Blueprint property, resource type, step sequence, and common pitfalls — so it stops guessing property names or forgetting require '/wordpress/wp-load.php' in runPHP steps. It works with Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Copilot, and Codex.
Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience.
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or Send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
This episode explores Podcasting 2.0, highlighting community-driven enhancements to RSS, the balance of distribution platforms, and evolving podcast formats.
It was great fun to conduct a Workshop at WordCamp Asia contributor day. Roughly 100 students were in the class and it was a great interactive session. I also know that there were quite a few of you who didn’t get to join us because there wasn’t enough room.
Birgit Pauli-Haack workshop on the block editor and full-site editing was a highlight of the entire event. Her depth of knowledge and infectious enthusiasm for the future of WordPress left me inspired and ready to dive deeper. – Kinjal Dwivedi
Special thanks to Birgit Pauli-Haack for the brilliant session on building block themes from scratch. – Nikul Valani
Birgit Pauli-Haack’s Block Themes workshop was equally sharp, demystifying modern theme architecture in ways that clicked instantly. Manisha Makhija
Building a Block Theme from Scratch by Birgit Pauli-Haack – a great hands-on look at how Full Site Editing is shaping modern WordPress – Fathima Begum
If you attended the Block Theme Development workshop at WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai and want to revisit the exercises, or if you couldn’t make it but want to work through it on your own, the complete workshop bundle is available on GitHub. Everything you need to follow along is included:
the reference theme,
demo content with media,
step-by-step instructions to start your theme, and
a blueprint to set up a local site with WordPress Studio or with WordPress Playground.
You can get started within minutes.
If you have used the Site Editor to customize a theme but have not yet built one from scratch, this workshop is a great next step. The exercises stay entirely within the visual editor. By the end, you will have a working portfolio theme and a solid understanding of how template parts, patterns, global styles, and custom templates fit together. Using the Create Block theme plugin, you can save all your changes in the new theme files, export it and use it on other websites.
A quick primer before you start
Before jumping into the exercises, it is worth reviewing the workshop slide deck. If you are coming from classic WordPress themes, the mental model is different. A block theme replaces PHP template files with HTML templates built from block markup, and it replaces scattered CSS with a single theme.json file that defines your colors, typography, spacing, and layout in one place. Templates and template parts live in their own folders, and every piece of them is made of blocks.
The Site Editor is where it all comes together. It gives you a visual canvas for designing templates, setting global styles, and previewing changes in real time. Developers ship defaults through theme.json; site owners customize through the Site Editor. When a user makes a change in the editor, it takes precedence over the theme default. Understand that layering is key before you dive into the exercises.
What the workshop covers
The workshop walks you through building Concrete & Light, a block theme for a fictional heritage architecture studio based in Mumbai. Rather than starting from theory, you start from a working site with real content — five pages and three project posts — and progressively shape the design through the Site Editor.
Three guided exercises take you from basics to custom templates:
Exercise 1: Styling the Header. You install fonts (Jost and Playfair Display), set up a semantic color palette, configure typography presets, and transform the default header into a dark, minimal navigation bar with uppercase text and an accent border. This is where you get comfortable with global styles and template parts.
Exercise 2: Footer and Global Elements. You build a four-column footer with studio branding, page links, social channels, and addresses. Then you style headings, links, and buttons across the entire site to ensure design consistency. By the end, you understand how global element styles cascade through your theme.
Exercise 3: Page Templates. This is where it gets interesting. You create a Landing Page template with a full-viewport hero image, a 40% overlay, and a dynamically pulled page title — no hardcoded text. Then you build a Category Projects template with a three-column query loop grid, giving you hands-on experience with archive templates and dynamic content.
You use the visual tools WordPress provides and see the results immediately. The Create Block Theme plugin is pre-installed so you can export your modifications as a proper theme at any point.
Getting started on your own
You have three options for setting up your site:
A visual app, WordPress Studio can import the included blueprint and have your site ready in a couple of minutes.
Using the command line, the Studio CLI will do the same thing with a single command.
Instructions for installing WordPress Studio or using the Studio CLI for the workshop are also available.
Whichever route you choose, the blueprint automatically installs WordPress, activates the required plugins, imports all demo content and media, and configures the site settings.
Once your site is running, open the exercise instructions on GitHub and work through them at your own pace. The instructions include color references, specific block settings, and enough context that you should not get stuck even without a workshop facilitator in the room.
The full workshop bundle is on GitHub. Fork it, clone it, or just download the ZIP. And if you build something with it, we would love to hear about it.
If you have trouble or run into problems, email pauli@gutenbergtimes.com or ping me on WP Slack or create an issue or discussion on GitHub
Attended the workshop “Building a Block Theme from Scratch” by Birgit Pauli-Haack , WordPress Core Contributor and it completely changed how I look at modern WordPress development.
Key takeaways :
• Block-based themes are shaping the future of WordPress • Flexibility and customization are now more powerful than ever • Modern theme development is all about blocks, not templates
It was an amazing learning experience and a great opportunity to connect with such an inspiring community.
[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
[00:00:26] 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 how web accessibility boosts traffic, SEO, and revenue.
[00:00:39] 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.
[00:00:56] 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.
[00:01:13] So on the podcast today we have Anne Bovelett.
[00:01:16] Anne is a seasoned accessibility strategist with many years of experience in the tech industry. Her journey into accessible design began several years ago, and since then, she’s become a passionate advocate for making the web a more inclusive place. Especially for WordPress users and developers. Drawing from her background in consulting, training, and her own experiences, Anne’s work focuses on the intersection of accessibility, universal design, and tangible business outcomes.
[00:01:46] This episode explores accessibility, not just as a moral imperative, but as a strategic advantage for website owners and businesses. Anne explains how neglecting accessibility means you are leaving serious money on the table, referencing compelling research from a variety of credible sources. These studies reveal practical data. Compliant sites enjoy increases in organic traffic, a boost in keyword rankings, stronger authority, and significant financial opportunities, sometimes running into millions and even billions.
[00:02:22] Anne talks about why accessibility hasn’t always been prioritised on the web, using analogies of the physical world, and the history of web development. She gets into the technical side as well, but this conversation is specifically geared towards the real world, bottom line, business benefits of accessible websites. Reach more users, boost revenue, and even reduce support costs.
[00:02:46] If you’re a website owner, developer, or digital business leader who’s ever wondered whether accessibility is worth it, this episode is for you.
[00:02:57] If you’re interested in finding 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.
[00:03:07] And so without further delay, I bring you Anne Bovelett.
[00:03:17] I am joined on the podcast by Anne Bovelett. Hello Anne.
[00:03:20] Anne Bovelett: Hi Nathan. Thank you for having me today.
[00:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Anne and I have been talking for quite a long time before we hit record and we’ve covered a lot of ground. But the ground that we’re going to cover today is all to do with accessibility, your WordPress website and why, well, why you are leaving money on the table if you are not pursuing the accessibility goals that you probably should be in the year 2026.
[00:03:43] Before we begin that, I guess it would be a good idea for you, Anne, to give us your credentials. Tell us a little bit about you and how come you get to speak authoritatively about accessibility in WordPress. So over to you, give us your bio.
[00:03:55] Anne Bovelett: It’s the most dangerous thing to ask me ever, right? Because I always talk too much.
[00:04:01] So let me do it differently this time. When I started figuring out about accessibility, about six years ago, I quickly realised that it’s not that complex to learn accessible coding. It’s not that complex to learn universal design principles. But what is hard for a lot of people working in accessibility is that many of them have this very social way of acting. I do too. I’m in it for the right reason, I think, because I want everybody to have freedom and also the freedom to make the same mistakes that we do, but also not to be constrained in any way.
[00:04:46] And then I was speaking to accessibility specialists, remediators, and in every layer of businesses, and I realised that they were being punched upon by organisations because they were just getting too many roles in one. The expectations were insane. So companies were 2 – 3000 people working for them, outputting I don’t know what kinds of digital products and websites, would expect one person to be the accessibility person to guard the compliance. And I mean this is a recipe for burnout 101.
[00:05:21] And one thing I don’t have a lack of is a big mouth. And one of the reasons why I started working for myself is because of that big mouth. I was not material to be hired, even though I managed to work for 22 years in employment. I realised at some point, if I ask a good fee, for some reason people take me seriously. Have you ever noticed that, Nathan? The more money you ask for, the more serious they’re going to take you. It’s absolutely ridiculous. But that’s what’s happening.
[00:05:59] And so I was trying to find my way in accessibility, like where do I fit in best? And then I thought, I’m going to be the flag bearer and I want to teach companies. And one of the things I like to do is to beat them with their own stick. Because I don’t care why someone makes whatever product, or whatever service they have accessible, I just care that they do. So if the stick that says money works, I’ll beat that. I’ll beat with that. It’s no doubt.
[00:06:35] And that’s where my career started changing, and especially since the past one and a half years. Someone said, you should change your job title. You should turn it into Accessibility Strategist. Well, here we are. I don’t care much for titles, but apparently that pretty much describes what I do.
[00:06:57] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious to me that if you were to, I say this phrase quite a lot on this podcast because there’s a lot of introspection going on and a lot of gazing back in time. It’s kind of curious that the accessibility bit never got importance from the get-go. And I mean right back from when the internet began.
[00:07:18] There was this great promise that suddenly great swathes of information, which would’ve been hither to unavailable to an awful lot of people, would suddenly be able to be parachuted into your living room via a computer and increasingly, you know, into your hand with a mobile phone.
[00:07:34] And yet the technology developed, the browsers developed, the web design industry developed, and it never got that importance. I’m genuinely puzzled by how that occurred. How it is that we all ignored that. And it really is probably only within the last 3, 4, 5 years that this clarion call for accessibility has become mainstream. I know that there’s people that have been banging the gong probably right from the beginning, but it has been largely ignored and I find that really curious.
[00:08:07] Anne Bovelett: I think that is due to two things. First of all, because people approach this as a purely social issue that needs to be resolved, and that people can’t imagine that they have certain users, which is arrogance at its finest. But, you know, that’s another topic.
[00:08:27] The other thing is good intentions. Like they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? Because in the beginning of the internet, when things got more colour, I always say this is the point, where things got more colourful, when Google was still small, when Alta Vista was still a thing and Yahoo and you remember, and I think we had four digit or five digit numbers for ICQ members. Actually the HTML, the sites were pretty ugly, right? They were fugly, I would say. I remember we had to build with tables and stuff, and then jump through hoops to make something look the way we wanted to.
[00:09:08] But the thing is, around that time, all we had was semantic HTML. We still have that, but back then it’s all we had. And because we were using semantic HTML, it was great for screen reader users, for example, and other assistive technology. But then everybody always wants to improve. They want to do better. And there is a German word for it, and I haven’t found the equivalent for that in English. We call it verschlimmbesserung. It literally means, instead of improving it, maybe down proving it. It’s like over-engineering.
[00:09:48] So this is what happened. And then people always want to work faster and they love building tools that help others, because in a sense, we are a social species, if you like it or not. We’re just social in the wrong things often, I think as a society. And from that perspective, there’ve been developers that had a great idea, said, let’s make frameworks, and then let’s make things easier for our fellow designers and developers.
[00:10:13] And very fast, at some point, semantic HTML was not a thing anymore because people were coding with div and span. And the div and span are the chameleons, the useless chameleons if you talk about accessibility, because you can make a div look like something, but you can’t make it behave like something until you put a ton of JavaScript on it. Div is like tofu without seasoning, right?
[00:10:41] And the same is with span. And because semantic elements like a button is challenging to style for some, a lot of frameworks came that used div and span a lot. And then they’re relying on JavaScript. And then these frameworks were growing and then at some point people were like, oh, this is the biggest framework used by everybody, so it must be good. That’s like saying the opinion of the majority is the truth. Unfortunately it’s not.
[00:11:15] That is my theory. I’m saying this more often. There was this time when everybody was doing Duolingo and then making big messages on social media, look, I’m on a 682.5 day streak in Duolingo, developers, right? And I’m like, why are you telling me about your streak for that but you can’t remember 50 semantic HTML elements? That’s very much also bashing the developer, which is pretty unfair because the problem is, with accessibility is, it’s not taken into account from the beginning.
[00:11:59] Let me compare that with another situation. So our family home burnt down to the ground and we had to rebuild, and then we got the chance to improve some things because we got modern stuff. And then, because we were building this community seminar centre at the same time, we needed to think about how we’re going to build the toilets, right? And then we had to go, and here, because the architect that helped us, he was nice guy, but he didn’t think about wheelchairs, about accessibility.
[00:12:32] At that time, I wasn’t thinking about accessibility or digital accessibility at all. But I was like, what if someone comes in with a wheelchair? Or what if we have a guest that weighs over 190 kilos? Will our toilet survive that? What kind of toilet do we need? And just close your eyes and go into that little toilet room, bathroom you call it, probably, and then close your eyes and imagine, okay, I have trouble moving, I have pain, I have rheumatism. I don’t but, you know, and I’m on a stick. Where do I put my stick? Do I have a place to put that in the corner? Can I reach for the paper?
[00:13:13] All these practical things. These are decisions that you take before you even start building the room. And it’s the same thing with anything else. Digital applications, terminals, elevators. I don’t know, anything. And the thing is, the better you do it, the less people have to ask questions afterwards about, how does this work?
[00:13:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because in the real world, I know that in the part of the world where I live, and I’ve made this comparison on different podcasts in the past. It’s so self-evident when somebody, for example, who’s using a wheelchair. It’s so self-evident when they can’t get in the building because, well, there they are at the door with some impediment. Maybe there’s three steps that are just unachievable. And it’s really obvious. There they are in the real world. You walk past and you notice it. It’s right there in front of you. Look, there’s a problem that needs to be solved.
[00:14:13] And so for the real world, the legislation in the part of the world where I am, came into effect many years ago. And so, for example, the ramps came in and all the premises that are publicly trading things must have ramps and so on and so forth.
[00:14:26] However, the internet is a different animal in that most of us are browsing in the comfort of our own home. Nobody has any idea what you are browsing. Nobody’s got any idea where it is failing for you because they’re not staring over your shoulder. And even if they were staring over their shoulder, it would be fairly hard for them to determine that, again, to use the metaphor of getting in the building, they wouldn’t see that you couldn’t get in the building even if they were watching your phone. It has to be reported by you, the user that can’t achieve the things. And so there’s this real kind of difficulty in matching it up.
[00:15:03] And also because a website kind of looks finished when it looks finished to most people, then you just put the tools away. There’s the website. It looks finished, so it is finished. We’re done. And of course, there’s this whole increasingly vocal cohort of people who, and we’ll get into them in a moment, who are not able to access these things, but they have to self-report.
[00:15:31] And who do you even report to? If I can’t access a building on my high street, let’s say the local library, I could probably even go to the police in all honesty. There’s a central place. I could go to the police, go to the council, and I could say, this must be fixed. And it, sure enough, it will be fixed. There is no equivalence here. Who would I go to to report a problem so that it will definitely be fixed.
[00:15:53] So there’s this whole sort of strange disconnect, which presents the problem of today. How do we encourage people who don’t get the self-reporting, that it’s a jolly good idea to fix the problems in advance?
[00:16:08] Anne Bovelett: Make it hurt.
[00:16:08] Nathan Wrigley: Or make it valuable, make the fix valuable. And in the scenario that you are describing today, we’re going to talk about some articles, one of which you’ve written, but also one which has been done by accessibilitychecker.org. We’re going to look into those. This is making the economic argument for doing it.
[00:16:26] Anne Bovelett: I’m sorry for interrupting you, but it was not just accessibilitychecker.org because then everybody’s going to go, oh, yeah, another accessibility site. This was Semrush. Semrush people. They did this together with accessibilitychecker.org.
[00:16:41] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, I’m reading out the URL where I located it, so yeah. But the point being that there’s an economic imperative. And that kind of cuts through a lot, doesn’t it? You know, if you go to a business and you say to them, if we were to make this minor tweak with your business, we could increase your revenue by 0.5 of a percent. If we make these other tweaks, we can increase you by 8%, 9%, or what have you.
[00:17:04] Any business owner who hears those words is going to be curious. Okay, right, you’ve got my attention, now what? And although it kind of misses out the whole moral argument, like we should be making sites accessible just because that’s morally the right thing to do. Put that to one side. Let’s go with the economic imperative.
[00:17:23] So I will link in the show notes to anything that we mention today. So I’ll just drop that in. Go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Anne, and all the links will be provided there, as well, I might add with a transcript of everything that we say today.
[00:17:38] Tell us the sort of headline pieces that you found curious in the accessibilitychecker.org piece, which is obviously, as you said, created by Semrush amongst others.
[00:17:47] Anne Bovelett: I’m just looking at the first page from Semrush itself. And it was interesting because they actually have an infographic on it that says, summary of findings. That’s not accessible at all, but we used it in our Hackathon project last year. But they tested 10,000 websites. And this is actually what I, and many of the people in my line of work have been waiting for, data, data, data. Because this is what companies care about. And I understand that. You know, they are responsible for people’s salaries, not just the revenue and the turnover, but also for the people that they employ, right?
[00:18:27] And so in this research it showed, after 10,000 websites, that 70% of the sites were not compliant. Well, that’s not news, right? But the thing is, they found a 23% traffic increase tied to higher compliance. 27% more keywords ranked with accessibility improvement. So this is major, but here’s the biggest one. 90% boost in authority score for compliant sites.
[00:18:59] And the thing is, when I read people, wow, we’ve been celebrating last Friday because we had a 0.5 increase in our click rates, for example. That’s another one. I’m like, that could be 10% or 15%. I’m happy to see that it now becomes clear that accessibility affects everything.
[00:19:21] And the thing is, people approach or companies approach accessibility from a technical standpoint. Like, what do we have to change technically? But accessibility is about people. It’s the same thing with all these solutions, the overlays, the whatever. They’re trying to approach it as a digital problem. But this is a human-centric problem. This is how people use the web.
[00:19:48] And now if you go back to SEO, one thing I learned a long time ago, I mean you can tell me about Google and other search engines, whatever you want, I don’t care how technical you are, their biggest customer is the people who search on the web, not the ones who pay them to show their stuff. And so this is what search engines are looking for.
[00:20:16] And now with AI, I’m having a blast because I see people writing stuff like, oh, we have to tell the AI to understand our website. But you are leaving your fate in SEO in the hands of something that is going to interpret what you are doing there.
[00:20:36] I’m not going to name the names. It would be unfair because I’m going to confront them with that before. But, there is a massive event that has a fantastic, big website. I find it hard to navigate, but that’s a personal thing. And that is a JavaScript invested monster. And just for fun of it, I just asked AI, can you find this and this and this for me on that page? And AI was like, no, I can’t. It’s rendering JavaScript. I can’t read this. What do you think that does to a screen reader or, because they’re all using the same technology to read it.
[00:21:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. When I’ve done podcast episodes about accessibility in the past, we’ve often dwelled not on this side, in fact, I don’t think we’ve ever touched sort of like the SEO and traffic benefit of it. It’s always been from the point of view of, what can you do? As an engineer, as a web developer, what can you do to go in in the weeds and fix things?
[00:21:28] We are just going to brush that aside. You can find that information out. You know, go and talk to Anne, for example, if you want to learn how to do it. But the principle here is more about the SEO and therefore the traffic side of things, on the flip side of doing the work. So you imagine, the work is not done. It’s poorer in terms of SEO and poorer in terms of reach, poorer in terms of search engine ranking, poorer in terms of revenue through your e-commerce platform or what have you. And then if you do do the work, all of those things increase incrementally.
[00:21:59] And in some cases the data shows fairly substantially. And so I’m just going to drill into each of those statistics one at a time because I feel it needs a little bit of like teasing out a little bit. So the first one is, well, there’s many statistics, but the first of the three that I’m going to mention, which you already have mentioned is organic traffic.
[00:22:17] So again, this is making the assumption that the work has been done. You’ve achieved the accessibility goals, presumably, which were many. You’ve jumped through all those hoops and you’ve got this benefit on the other side. And here’s some possible benefits.
[00:22:29] Organic traffic increased by an average of 23% as a site’s accessibility compliance score increased. So can I ask you, is that one directly related to search engines then? Because it feels like it is. You know, you did the accessibility work and a byproduct of that is that you became more visible on search engines. Have I got that right?
[00:22:50] Anne Bovelett: Yeah, of course because if assistive technology can’t read your site, the search engines probably can’t either.
[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s kind of interesting though that you get that much of a boost. You’d think if you had improved things, you might see, I don’t know, a few percent here and there, but this figure of 23%. I mean imagine saying that to a marketing person, or the growth person inside of a company, 23% is possible. The word average in that sentence is bolded. So it’s an average of 23%. So presumably there’s a few that are lower and there’s a few that are higher, but an average increase of 23%. So I don’t ever use the phrase win-win.
[00:23:32] Anne Bovelett: It is win-win. It’s win-win on sides. Maybe that’s a little bit the dark side in me, but I go to business dinners, meetings, entrepreneur get togethers, blah, blah, blah. And then I always hear, at some point I hear people say, I don’t get it. We are paying our SEO companies so much money, and we are not getting better results. And we have had a redesign on our website. And then I look at their website like, hmm, yeah, sure.
[00:24:01] And then they will fix the site at some point, maybe they will improve the site, where the design goes, where the user flow goes. But still, it’s not ranking better, and still it’s not ranking better. And I wonder when SEO companies are going to become so smart that they’re going to tell their customer, hey customer, stop writing click here everywhere.
[00:24:25] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a great, concrete example of what you’re talking about, because I was going to drill into the next one because honestly, the next point does confuse me a little bit. Again, I’ll link to it in the show notes, but point 4, I’ll just read it here, is websites ranked for an average of 27% more organic keywords with a higher accessibility score.
[00:24:45] Can you tease that out for me? Because I’m genuinely puzzled by what that even means. I’m not sure how there’s this overlap between accessibility compliance, and the keywords and how the search engine would pick them up. So that’s me being ignorant.
[00:24:59] Anne Bovelett: I would say, set the compliance story on fire. Torch it, and throw it away because compliance is what makes people do the bare minimum. And I think, I know they had to use this term in the report because they’ve been checking it if the site is compliant. And then you will get lulled into a false sense of security when your score says, like Google does in Lighthouse, ooh, you are 97% accessible. And like, yeah, but the 3% that you say it’s not, is what’s blocking about 80% of a group of potential visitors that you are not having.
[00:25:40] But again, it’s about, in my opinion, it’s about the way things have been coded and the way things have been written. For example, what happens is buttons that aren’t buttons that are not really saying, how do you say it? It’s the same thing. It’s the read more thing again. I have to be careful that I don’t go into the rabbit hole here too much. But it’s the read more thing. It is text where links are actually named properly.
[00:26:08] And just to give you an example, I see a lot of people who try to do affiliate marketing. Let’s say food bloggers. They make humongous sites. They love using WordPress. I know that. There are tons of plugins also for food bloggers to play out the, what do you call that in English? The nutritional values of this and that. All right. And then these bloggers, people complain about it like, oh, why do they have to write their life stories and that of the spider in the corner on the ceiling before they give me the recipe? Well, that is because they’re trying to get caught in the search engines, right?
[00:26:44] And then they have all these links. Like, someone creates a great meal with a fantastic expensive pan and a pot, and I don’t know what, and they have all these articles from Amazon. And all they have is click here, click here, click here, click here. And then imagine someone who is using that. I mean I love, I have a nice little, what do you call that, extension in Chrome? I’ve been speaking German all morning. This is why my English is so rusty right now. I have this extension and it just, in a big article, if I want to know, oh, what was that tool that she was using again? I’ll go get the link list with that little extension there, or I’ll just run the screen reader and get the link list, because that’s easy for me to do. And then all I see is click here, click here, click here. So I’m not finding the link through that pan, and so I’m not buying it through her link.
[00:27:35] Affiliate websites could make so much more money if they would just do the right thing in their content. Let’s forget about the code of the theme that they chose, just the content. If that is played out correctly, and it’s not some JavaScript generated hoo-ha, which doesn’t happen in WordPress Core, they would make a lot more money.
[00:27:58] Nathan Wrigley: Because I haven’t really been following the SEO industry for a very long time, I really don’t have much intelligence around what search engines these days look for. You know, back in the day when I was building websites, there was a, almost like a playbook that you could go through. And if you did these things, you could achieve reasonable results in SEO.
[00:28:18] And that was the state of the internet 15 years ago when algorithms were less sophisticated, and people were just beginning to kind of get online and use things like Google all the time. But it sounds to me as if we’ve got to a point with search engines, as if they’re able to, I’m maybe going to overstate this, it feels like the more human you have become as a website, the more likely Google will favour you.
[00:28:48] I’m not really encapsulating that very well, but what I mean is, if you put content on there, which is human readable. If you make it obvious where to click to do the thing, rather than stop it with keywords and things which, you know, is not really in the best intentions of humans, that’s clearly done for the algorithm only, it does sound like you are saying that the search engines favour, I’m doing air quotes here, humanity.
[00:29:15] Anne Bovelett: They always have. Let me circle back to what I said before. We, as the people who use search engines, and nowadays they’re AI in whatever they do, we are the biggest customer for them. Because if we’re not there to search, to use them, they can’t sell their services to the people paying to be found.
[00:29:37] I might be, how do you say that, unorthodox in this approach, but I’ve seen it. I have a friend, Manuela van Prooijen, she’s the owner of a company called Weblish. In the Netherlands she trains people in how to set up businesses with WordPress and how to build with WordPress. And you wouldn’t expect it when someone is just focused on that, but she’s got a very broad perspective of things. And she dove into SEO in a way that I’ve never seen before. And some of the SEO experts that I know, and we know together, were like, why didn’t we ever think of that? And it had to do with structured data. And of course, everything she builds is accessible.
[00:30:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I’m going to pivot slightly. However, I think we’ve made the case that if you are endeavouring to make your website more accessible, I think by reading that piece, you will understand that there are definite benefits in terms of traffic and search engine rankings and so on. So let’s just take that one as a given.
[00:30:43] And then I’m going to move over to a piece which you yourself wrote, not that long ago actually. Almost exactly a year ago, March 4th, 2025. It’s on your website, annebovelett.eu. It’s called The E-commerce Industry’s Billion Pound Mistake. And in here you make the argument, and you bind it to money, to actual dollar terms and things like that, which is quite interesting.
[00:31:05] So I’m wondering if you’d just paint the numbers around what you were saying here, if you can remember. I know it’s a year ago now that you wrote it. But broadly speaking, what was the economic case that you were making?
[00:31:13] Anne Bovelett: It’s actually, this is based on a British report, actually. It’s called the Click Away Pound Report. It was brought in 2019. And that actually measures how much revenue people left lying on the street by not making their shops, their online shops, accessible. And the economic case is, we say in Dutch, you thief your own wallet, if you’re not doing it. And again, these are, this is data, these are numbers.
[00:31:48] So in 2016, for example, the click away pound increased by 45%. Let me just throw around some numbers, right? So in 2016, the money that people left lying on the street by not making their eshops accessible was 11.75 billion. Billion, not million, billion pounds. In 2019, that was already up to 17 billion. Really, I don’t know if they’re going to do another Click Away Pound Report again at some point, but I think we’re going to be shocked. Because since 2019, the state of the internet actually worsened because of all this technology. And it’s getting worse because of all this vibe coding voodoo, where they’re using AI that is trained on inaccessible code. But that’s another thing.
[00:32:45] So there’s another article that I have. I think it is so much money that people leave lying on the street, this is larger than the Chinese economy, that amount. It’s in an article I wrote about e-commerce in 2022, where I was criticising CMSs, including WooCommerce, who actually did a great job. Now WooCommerce Core is now accessible. And said, okay, if your system sucks, the people using your system are going to lose without being able to help it.
[00:33:18] Nathan Wrigley: If you send me the link to that piece, I will obviously add that into the show notes.
[00:33:22] Anne Bovelett: It seems I’m on the cold side of accessibility because that is something that forever stuck with me. Someone called me cold hearted, because I’m talking about the commercial side of accessibility all the time. But, you know, there was a time, this is maybe a strange segway, but there was a time where I weighed way over a hundred kilos. I was so heavy. I had trouble moving, I was in pain, I was uncomfortable. And for me, buying clothes became an uncomfortable exercise. Going into these shops, especially these nice boutique shops, with their very small cabins, you know, trying to turn around and not being able to step into a pair of pants or whatever. Just uncomfortable.
[00:34:13] But the most uncomfortable thing about it for me was that I got blatantly ignored by the ladies that were selling the clothes in the stores. And three years after that, I had lost about 37 kilos. And I came into that one store where it was very, very apparent that they really weren’t interested in talking to me at all. I came in and they immediately jumped me, both of them, the shop owner and her assistant. And I got madder and madder and madder and madder.
[00:34:49] And at some point I said, you know what? Keep your clothes, just tell me don’t you remember me? Don’t you know who I am? No, we don’t remember you. And I was like, well, here’s the picture. Oh yeah, I’ve seen you before. And you know what, the fact, at that time I was thinking, maybe it’s because you’re too busy or you are, you know, I don’t know. But the fact that you jumped me right now with the same amount of people in the place tells me something else.
[00:35:15] Now, why am I telling this story? This is how a lot of people that need assistive technology feel, and also how older people feel on the web. I mean, I don’t know about the UK, but in the Netherlands, you can’t do your taxes without a couple of apps on a phone. Well, if you jump through a million hoops, maybe you can send it in on paper still, but it’s almost impossible. If apps like that don’t work correctly, you’re putting people’s fate in someone else’s hand, because you’re working with their tax number.
[00:35:54] I don’t know in the UK, in the Netherlands, your personal tax number, never ever give that to someone. Never. Your social security number, don’t do it. And then you’re like, maybe 60, 70-year-old, and you’re right before that stage where the technology’s getting too hard for you, but apps to do these things are too difficult.
[00:36:17] There is a local tax office in the Netherlands that had a full accessibility redesign done by Level Level in Rotterdam. And for them, the support requests went down, I think by 30% or something. I couldn’t find the case on their website anymore.
[00:36:35] But this is because people are being empowered to do things by themselves. That’s what they want. And for example, in Germany, there are statistics about that. This is an article that I actually published today that, I think it says like 90% of all German users will always try to first solve something by themselves, and if it doesn’t work they’ll walk away.
[00:36:58] Nathan Wrigley: That’s one of the curious things that come out of the article. The first part of this conversation was all about SEO and what have you. We didn’t really talk much about the person experiencing the problem. It was more about search engines and maybe how you would technically fix things. But this is so interesting. In your piece, you, and I’m just going to quote it because that’s going to be the easiest way to get the information into the record.
[00:37:20] And it says, a shocking 75% of disabled customers have willingly paid more for a product from an accessible website, rather than struggle with a cheaper inaccessible one. And that kind of sums up the whole thing really for me, that if you are faced with a struggle to do something, let’s say, I dont know, you want to buy a widget and it’s $100. The calculus that you are going through is, I could spend an hour and a half trying to get that $100 widget, or I could go to this other website and pay $120 for it and be done in three minutes. Well, that’s obvious, I know which one I’m going to do, which is really interesting.
[00:38:02] Anne Bovelett: Yeah, yeah. And there’s another thing. People are always like, oh, accessibility is only for the blind. No. The people that go forgotten in that, and I have to tell you, disabilities rarely come alone, right? I’m just going to take myself as an example. I have ADHD on steroids. I’m in the spectrum. I’m old. I need two pairs of glasses, one for my computer, one for my regular stuff. I’m starting to lose my hearing in certain regions. I am the target group. If I need to go and order, and I’m B2B, right? I’m a business.
[00:38:41] I will order B2B because then I can deduct the VAT. And I have to buy hardware. And I always try to buy the best. I will go to a store, maybe, and it’s B2B and I will go online. If I can’t figure out their stuff, I’m leaving. If I need to look at a manual, a video manual, that has background music while someone is talking, but there is no subtitles, I’m gone. I can’t follow it. My brain won’t let me.
[00:39:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean the analogy in my head is kind of, I don’t know, you’re going into a clothes shop or something like that and you need a new pair of shoes or something, and you discover that all the shoes are in a locked cupboard in a corner. And in order to get to the shoes, you need to ask a receptionist for the key. And then they go and find the key, and then they give you the wrong key and the key doesn’t work. And then they don’t point out where the box of shoes is, so you’re completely confused.
[00:39:36] That whole thing is just avoided by going to the next shop along the street where all the shoes are right there for you to pick up and try on and what have you. You’ve made the journey easy, and it turns out that price isn’t necessarily the prime mover here, which is really interesting. I find that statistic fascinating, that people will pay accordingly if they can get what they need out of it. I mean I know it sounds like common sense, but having it painted in those stark colours is.
[00:40:04] Anne Bovelett: Yeah, yeah. This is one of the things I did want to mention as well. I have the privilege of talking to Mark Weisbrod a lot from Greyd. You know him? He’s the CEO of Greyd. I think he’s unique, especially in the world of WordPress because he’s looking at things solely from a business perspective. He’s not distracted by technical issues or whatsoever. He will get it from there. He’s someone who often says to me like, okay, I like the story now show me the data.
[00:40:39] But then at some point, I remember it was before the European Accessibility Act was coming into effect, I think. So this, we’re talking about this in 2023 or something. And then I said, I don’t get it. Why is everybody so focused on the European Accessibility Act? Look at how much money they can make by leaving people their dignity. Because that’s basically what it is by making your stuff accessible.
[00:41:06] If you get past the stupid idea that if something is accessible, it can’t look nice. I mean, go to github.com without being logged in, that’s accessible. It’s a wonderful website. And then I said, where is the common sense? Why, if I talk to the C-suite of a company in one of those business things, and I say, listen, if you would make this and this and this more accessible in your web shop, your turn over would go up by so many percent, why are they not like, we’ve got to invest this money right now?
[00:41:39] And then he said, no matter what, people will always think with their wallet today and tomorrow. They’re not thinking about next week. Only the most visionary leaders in the industries think way more. And this is something I say now, because he said, he was telling me about they were selling, in a company he worked for, they were selling solar systems. And these systems would save the buyers so much money on the long run, but it was very hard to sell them because it was in the long run.
[00:42:20] And if a CEO or a CFO, I mean I know it sounds offending, I don’t mean it that way, but in large corporations it’s to eat or to be eaten. Managers are always afraid of their managers kicking down on them and the others kicking up, and they’re always trying to defend their own spot in the business. It’s only in smaller companies that people can have more leverage. So there are always so many powers at play in a company that if you start talking to a company about, it’s for the greater good of your company, it’s the same argument as it’s for the greater good of humanity.
[00:42:59] And I’ll just give you another number for example. Based on the Click Away Pound Report, and some other data that I have, I’ve been working on building a calculator. You tell me which country your web shop is in, you tell me how much turnover you have per year and then that calculator is going to tell you how much potential revenue you are walking away from by not making it accessible. I did this for very, very big supermarket chain in Switzerland, and the outcome was you could make 0.94% more revenue. And then you’re like, yeah, less than 1%. Yeah, sure. Ah, it’s still 350 million Swiss Francs.
[00:43:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Less than 1% but still that kind of money, wow.
[00:43:47] Anne Bovelett: Yes. And then you get this perspective thing. Because I’m pretty sure the day that this knowledge seeps through to the unions of the employees of this company, the employees are going to go like, why do we have to save money, or why do we not get a raise where you don’t take the opportunity to make that much more turnover? And then someone else with other interests in the company says, yeah, but the stakeholders, you know, or the investors, this is why this is not happening. I mean, we all think common sense is the greatest good in the world. People do not have common sense, period.
[00:44:33] Nathan Wrigley: It’s that sort of invisible layer to people who don’t experience any of the accessibility problems that the industry is trying to tackle. For example, you’re fully sighted, you can use your legs and walk about and use a mouse and use regular computer and use a regular screen and your ears are working fine and all those kind of things. All of that stuff is just sort of hidden from you, and so it just somehow doesn’t drive itself to the front of your consciousness.
[00:44:56] Which is why this is so interesting because, although you said you’ve kind of been berated in the accessibility community for banging the gong about money all the time, it’s a great way to cut through, isn’t it? You can go to the CEO of a company and make the economic argument, I would imagine, much more readily than you can do with the moral argument.
[00:45:16] Anne Bovelett: I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about writing up a profile for a position in companies that I don’t think exists yet. Because normally, we call it the sheep with five legs in Dutch. It’s very hard to find that sheep with five legs. If someone is an accessibility officer in a big company, they are being banged on for compliance. If someone is working on accessibility in a lower rank, they’re getting overworked because people have so many expectations or they just don’t do things.
[00:45:52] It’s always, this person is screaming in the desert like, hey, this is happening. I’ve seen this happen, I was guiding a company with more than I think 13 or 14 development teams, over 85 people, and they didn’t talk to each other. Design, didn’t talk to development, development didn’t talk to development in other areas, because that was how the company was structured.
[00:46:18] And I think people need to be educated in two ways to have this position that doesn’t exist yet. It’s a position where you are able to kick the shins of the C-suite in a professional manner, of course, but also sit down with development, design, and content teams and make them communicate with each other in a way that works.
[00:46:48] And for that, you have to understand these processes. And normally, I’m absolutely not for people in managing positions that know the job that the people they’re managing is doing, because they very often become that, how do you say that, the driver on the carriage running in front of the horses? You know, that’s really dangerous. You shouldn’t interfere into detail level too much.
[00:47:15] But if you understand it on a detail level, from design content and development, you can get these people to talk to each other and help each other. Because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a developer that sees a design and is like, woah, that design, the way that is made, that’s going to cause some accessibility issues. Those are issues.
[00:47:39] And normally they will just, no, no, I was asked to develop this. I’ll develop it. Instead, you need to raise a culture where people go to the designer and say, hey, I noticed this. What is your thought behind this? And they can’t. And if they had a middle person for that where they could go to and say, look, I got this, I’m not sure about it, then you would have a fantastic flow in a company to make things accessible.
[00:48:06] Because this goes through so much more. So an article that I published today is about how much money you lose in support. It’s the same thing. If a support, people doing support are not used to really listen and someone says, I’m hard of hearing, or someone says, I have dyslexia. When you’re saying, yeah, go read it, it’s on that page on our website. If this person calls you because he couldn’t find, or understand the page, and then you force this person into vulnerability by admitting that he or she has dyslexia. And that is going to leave a very bad taste in someone’s mouth. And what happens? They’re going to walk away. If you’re not some government thing that everybody needs like, I don’t know, taxes, because otherwise they’ll come and rob you.
[00:48:54] Nathan Wrigley: It is genuinely so interesting because a lot of the content that I’ve made in the past has been definitely about the ways to fix your website. So here’s the WCAG guidelines, go figure. This episode’s been really entirely different.
[00:49:07] So first of all, looking at Semrush, and the data. Just sort of painting the picture of the improvements that you can get in terms of traffic and visibility across search engines should you go down the accessibility route. But also then getting into the financial bit, which it sounds like is your thing.
[00:49:27] So I think that’s hopefully of interest to some people who perhaps have just always thought about accessibility as a, I’m a web developer, there’s another job that I’ve got to do. Well, now you’re kind of armoured with things that you could maybe even approach clients with. You know, you’ve got a website, we haven’t looked at it in a few years, you are always looking for ways to make more revenue out of your website. Well, look, I’ve got this thing in my back pocket. This is a really credible way that we can do some tweaks. I know what I need to do. There’s guidelines that I can follow. Let’s do that and see if we can improve the revenue.
[00:50:00] I think we’ve probably covered that. And so with that in mind, Anne, just before we end, I’m going to try and link to the piece that you mentioned. I’ll certainly, anything that we’ve mentioned in this podcast, I’ll try and link to in the show notes on WP Tavern. Do you just want to tell us where we can find you? I did reference your website at one point during the podcast, but do you just want to give us that again, or maybe social networks or something like that where you hang out?
[00:50:23] Anne Bovelett: If you remember how to spell my name, just put it in Google, you’ll find me everywhere. Okay. No. So it’s Anne and then Bovelett, which is B from Bernard, B-O-V-E-L-E-T-T. You can find me on LinkedIn a lot. I’m there a lot because I talk shop a lot.
[00:50:44] Very active on X, Twitter. So that’s where you find me. And don’t be afraid to approach me. Just, if you send me LinkedIn DMs, it can take a while because sometimes I get too many, and then I’m overwhelmed and, yeah. But the best thing is to send me an email. Just go to the contact page on my website.
[00:51:06] Nathan Wrigley: All that it remains for me to do is to say, Anne Bovelett, thank you for chatting to me today. That was really interesting. Thank you so much.
[00:51:12] Anne Bovelett: Thank you for having me and giving me the platform.
Anne is a seasoned accessibility strategist with many years of experience in the tech industry. Her journey into accessible design began several years ago, and since then she’s become a passionate advocate for making the web a more inclusive place, especially for WordPress users and developers. Drawing from her background in consulting, training, and her own experiences, Anne’s work focuses on the intersection of accessibility, universal design, and tangible business outcomes.
This episode explores accessibility, not just as a moral imperative, but as a strategic advantage for website owners and businesses. Anne explains how neglecting accessibility means you’re leaving serious money on the table, referencing compelling research from a variety of credible sources. These studies reveal practical data. Compliant sites enjoy increases in organic traffic, a boost in keyword rankings, stronger authority, and significant financial opportunities, sometimes running into millions and even billions.
Anne talks about why accessibility hasn’t always been prioritised on the web, using analogies of the physical world and the history of web development. She gets into the technical side as well, but this conversation is specifically geared toward the real-world, bottom-line business benefits of accessible websites, reach more users, boost revenue, and even reduce support costs.
If you’re a website owner, developer, or digital business leader who’s ever wondered whether accessibility work is ‘worth it’ this episode is for you.
Cybersecurity in web hosting is increasingly complex, requiring a layered security approach. Diverse threats demand specialized defenses, with ongoing challenges balancing protection and usability against evolving AI-driven attacks.
In this episode, Bob Dunn introduces “Keep It Open,” a new initiative designed to support the independence and sustainability of the network. Bob Dunn explains why maintaining honest conversations and championing the open web matters, and invites listeners, whether makers, developers, technologists, or agencies to join as fellow believers in this mission. Unlike traditional memberships, […]
In this episode, host Matthias Pfefferle chats with software engineer Will Norris, discussing his extensive contributions to open standards, federated identity, and open source, particularly within the WordPress ecosystem and the evolution of decentralized social networking.
The shoemaker’s children go barefoot or, as we say in French, Les cordonniers sont toujours les plus mal chaussés. That’s been me for years. As a developer working on WordPress, I’ve long neglected the design of my site. This ends today.
We’ve recently released a new tool called Studio Code, think of it as Claude Code but tailored for WordPress. A tool you can install by running npm -g install wp-studio and invoke using studio code locally. Or you can try directly using npx wp-studio code. I took this as an opportunity to see what it’s capable of, and oh boy! I’m mind-blown 🤯
It took me:
1 tiny prompt to pull the site locally
1 main redesign prompt and 3 or 4 follow-up prompts to get everything redesigned and sorted out.
1 last tiny prompt to push the site online
The whole process lasted about a couple of hours during the weekend, while watching yet another Sinner-Alcaraz match on TV.
(Ok, I’m lying a bit. The push didn’t work the first time because I had discovered a bug that had since been fixed.)
There are a lot of things that made the experience so enjoyable for me. I can see myself switching how I work with WordPress sites entirely to this process:
All it took to get access to all my remote sites was to login to WP.com prompted by the tool itself.
I didn’t have to think much or configure anything. I didn’t have to install any MCP, or provide any specific instructions. It just worked.
I really enjoyed the feeling of freedom it gives you to iterate on your designs, content, and explore wild ideas. It feels like everything is possible, your ideas are the limit.
I really enjoyed the safety net of the local development. I can change anything, break whatever I want, yet it’s still local and won’t impact my live site until I decide.
I literally just said “push my site back to riad.blog” and that was it.
Nonetheless, the tool still has some rough edges, but we’re shipping early and iterating fast. We want you to test it and please share any feedback you have with us. We have a lot of ideas and you can also bring your own, it’s all Open Source.
I forgot, what do you think about my new design? I wanted something minimal but gives you a small “hacker” feeling. Don’t be too harsh on me.
Real-time collaboration in WordPress enhances team efficiency by allowing simultaneous editing, though initial limitations exist. Future improvements aim for smoother, scalable experiences.
I’ve just released Media Picker for Immich on the WordPress.org plugin directory. It connects WordPress to a self-hosted Immich server so you can browse, search, and insert your photos and videos into posts without copying files around.
Immich
I run Immich at home. It’s where my photos now live. They’re organised, searchable, with facial recognition and AI search. My WordPress uploads directory is where photos used to go, and the two never talked to each other. This plugin fixes that.
How it works
Point the plugin at your Immich server and give it an API key. You can set a site-wide key or let each user configure their own to connect to their own Immich account.
If the site-wide key is blank, each user adds their own key on their profile page. All Immich API calls happen server-side.
Two ways to add media
Once configured, an Immich tab appears in two places.
The first is the Media Library grid. Switch to the Immich view and you can search, filter by person, and either Use or Copy assets into WordPress.
Use creates a virtual attachment. Nothing is copied; WordPress proxies the media from Immich on demand and caches it locally on first request. Your uploads directory stays lean.
Copy downloads the original file into wp-content/uploads/ as a normal attachment.
The same tab shows up in the “Select or Upload Media” dialog inside the post editor, so you can pull an Immich photo straight into a post without leaving the editor.
A few details worth mentioning
Videos work too. Proxied videos stream with seek support.
Lightbox. Proxied Immich images in posts open a full-resolution lightbox on click.
Local cache. Proxied media is cached to wp-content/cache/immich/ after the first fetch. Optional cleanup with a configurable lifetime.
Your server stays private. Immich only needs to be reachable from WordPress — not from the public internet. Visitors never connect to Immich directly.
When images are copied over, virtually or otherwise, you can insert them into a post like any other image, which also includes adding them to galleries in posts.
Get it
Install it from the WordPress plugin directory or search for “media picker for Immich” in the plugins page in WordPress.
Feedback and bug reports are welcome. Development is done on GitHub here.
WordCamp Asia 2026 brought the global WordPress community to Mumbai, India, from April 9–11, gathering contributors, organizers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees at the Jio World Convention Centre for three days of learning, collaboration, and community. With 2,627 attendees, the event reflected the scale of the WordPress community and the strong turnout throughout the event.
The event unfolded across Contributor Day and two conference days, with a program that moved from technical sessions and workshops to hallway conversations, shared meals, and joyful moments of connection across the venue. From first-time attendees to longtime contributors, WordCamp Asia 2026 reflected the breadth of the WordPress ecosystem and the many ways people shaped and sustained it.
WordPress is not a company. It is a shared commitment to keeping the web open.
Mary Hubbard, Executive Director, WordPress
Throughout the event, WordCamp Asia 2026 balanced formal programming with the conversations happening around it. Sessions and workshops set the pace, while morning networking, tea breaks, lunch, the family photo, the sponsor’s raffle, and the after party in Jasmine Hall helped make the event feel welcoming, social, and connected.
How WordCamp Asia 2026 Took Shape
Bringing together contribution, practical learning, and forward-looking conversation in one shared program. Across Contributor Day and the conference sessions that followed, attendees moved between hands-on work, technical talks, workshops, and broader discussions about AI, education, enterprise, community growth, and the open web.
The result was a WordCamp that felt expansive without losing its sense of connection. Different rooms with topics as themes, helping different audiences, and different forms of participation all fed into the same larger picture: a community actively building what comes next for WordPress as a feeling that something bigger was happening: not just a schedule being delivered, but a community showing up for one another and for the future of WordPress.
Contributor Day: Building WordPress Together
Contributor Day opened WordCamp Asia 2026 with one of the clearest expressions of what makes the project special: people coming together to move WordPress forward by working on it. More than 1,500 participants joined 38 table leads across more than 20 contribution tables, creating a day that was expansive in scale and grounded in real work. For some, it was a return to familiar teams and longtime collaborators. For others, it was the beginning of their contributor journey.
The day moved between structured learning and hands-on participation. Alongside contributor sessions, attendees joined workshops, visited the Open Source Library, took part in YouthCamp, and attended The Making of a WordPress Release: Conversations with Past Release Squad Members, a featured panel that added depth and perspective to the work of building and sustaining WordPress.
What made Contributor Day stand out was not only the number of people in the room, but the range of ways they could take part. Workshops created space for skill-building. YouthCamp brought younger participants into the experience and widened the event’s reach in a meaningful way. The day felt welcoming, energetic, and full of possibility.
By the end, the impact was already visible across teams. Polyglots contributors suggested more than 7,000 strings and reviewed 3,200 of them. Photo contributors uploaded 76 images. The Test team worked on more than 20 tickets, and 55 contributors joined Training. Those numbers told only part of the story, but they pointed to what Contributor Day continued to do so well: turn a large gathering into shared work that strengthened the project in real time.
Conference Sessions Take Shape
Across the conference days, WordCamp Asia 2026 covered a wide range of topics, from technical development and hands-on workshops to business strategy and the open web. Sessions took place across the Foundation, Growth, and Enterprise tracks, with workshops running alongside the main program.
One of the opening sessions was James LePage’s WordPress and AI, which introduced a theme that appeared throughout the conference: how WordPress is responding to changes in AI, publishing, and developer workflows. That topic continued in later sessions focused on AI-driven development, autonomous testing, plugin maintenance, and automation.
Later that morning, a fireside chat with Mary Hubbard and Shilpa Shah shifted the focus toward trust, security, and the longer-term questions shaping open source publishing. Coming early in the program, the conversation gave the conference an important center of gravity, pairing technical change with questions of stewardship, resilience, and what people needed from WordPress as the web continued to evolve. Rather than pulling away from the event’s technical momentum, it deepened it, bringing a human perspective to the pace of change and reminding the audience that progress in open source is not only about what gets built, but about how communities guide, challenge, and sustain that work over time.
Together, the two conference days made clear that WordCamp Asia 2026 was designed not for one kind of attendee, but for many. Developers, founders, marketers, contributors, organizers, and people finding their place in WordPress for the first time all found something that spoke directly to their work and interests. The breadth of the program was striking, but so was the feeling that these conversations mattered now.
Building What Comes Next
WordCamp Asia 2026 closed with reflections from Mary Hubbard, following an opening announcement from Chenda Ngak that WordCamp India will join the calendar in 2027 as the fourth flagship WordPress event.
Mary’s remarks tied together several threads that had already surfaced throughout the event: India’s long-standing role in the WordPress project, the growth of programs like Campus Connect and WordPress Credits, the energy of YouthCamp, and the significance of WordPress 7.0. One of the clearest ideas in the session was that WordPress is entering a new phase shaped by real-time collaboration, AI infrastructure, and global contributor growth. That framing gave the closing session a strong sense of direction without losing sight of the community work that made it possible.
The session then shifted into a panel discussion about the current state of WordPress and where the project is headed next. Peter Wilson and Sergey Biryukov joined Hubbard on stage, while audience questions brought the conversation back to many of the themes that had shaped the event across all three days. Even from afar, Ma.tt Mullenweg remained part of the discussion, following along remotely and sending written responses during the live Q&A.
Those questions touched on contributor growth, AI, plugins, local communities, product direction, and the long-term health of the open web. What stood out was how often the answers returned to the same core idea: WordPress continues to grow through open discussion, shared responsibility, and the people who keep showing up to build it together.
A Lasting Momentum
Over three days in Mumbai, WordCamp Asia 2026 brought together contribution, learning, and community. From Contributor Day through the closing keynote, the event balanced hands-on work with bigger conversations about publishing, technology, education, and the open web.
The event also created space for many kinds of participation. Some attendees contributed to Core, Training, Polyglots, Photos, and other teams. Others came for the conference program, workshops, or the chance to reconnect with collaborators and meet new people. Across session rooms, tea breaks, shared meals, sponsor hall conversations, and the after party, the community side of the event remained just as important as the formal program.
Thank you to the organizers, volunteers, speakers, sponsors, attendees, and everyone who joined online. WordCamp Asia 2026 was a reminder that WordPress continues to grow through the people who show up to contribute and build together.
AI is revolutionizing release communication for open source projects by automating updates, enhancing clarity, and maintaining human oversight, ensuring effective information delivery.
This is an aggregation of blogs talking about WordPress from around the world. If you think your blog should be part of this site, send an email to Matt.
The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #130 – WordPress 7.0, Gutenberg 22.9 and 23.0, WordCamp Europe, Block Themes and More with Tammie Lister, Chief Product Officer at Convesio 
Introduction
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Early Life and Education
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. Chemistry was my subject, but it was not my passion.
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Choosing Independence
Becoming a Contributor
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WordCamp Experiences in India
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The Dream of WordCamp Asia
Dream Became Reality
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What WordCamp Asia Gave Me
