Year: 2025
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The Stretchy Type Block: how it works under the hood (and why that’s “weird” but smart)
If you’ve ever wanted a headline that always fits its container—no manual font sizing, no media queries—Stretchy Type delivers. It’s a Gutenberg block that scales your text to the exact width of its container in both the editor and on the frontend. The core trick In plain terms: it measures the text once, then lets…
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We’ve Poisoned the Well, and We Can Never Make It Pure Again
The day everything changed was November 30, 2022. That was when ChatGPT was unleashed upon humanity, and my daughters’ friends discovered they could get an AI to write their university essays while they sat around eating crisps and watching Love Island. Sure, we had “AI” before then: autocorrect, spellcheck, Siri telling us to turn left…
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No servers. No installs. Just a link, and a complete WordPress site appears.
If you’ve ever worked with WordPress, you’ll know the pain of spinning up a site just to test an idea. That’s why WordPress Playground is such a breakthrough. It runs WordPress entirely in your browser. No servers. No setup. Just open a tab and you have a working site. It’s one of those technologies that…
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I’m Not Sure WordPress Can Be WordPress Anymore
(Or: What If It Could Be Something Even Bigger?) Loveable is now valued at $1.8 billion, with $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That’s not a typo. A tool that lets people build and deploy full web apps with AI just passed a milestone that many of us in the WordPress ecosystem would have laughed…
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WordPress Introduces “AI Building Blocks
Based on James LePage’s post on the WordPress Core AI Blog – July 17, 2025 WordPress is laying the foundation for a smarter, more flexible future with the introduction of AI Building Blocks — a set of tools designed to integrate artificial intelligence into the platform in a consistent and open way. These tools are…
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Every WordPress Website Should Have This Free Plugin
There’s a new free WordPress plugin that can make your website feel dramatically smoother and more professional — and most people haven’t heard of it yet. It’s called the View Transitions plugin, and it uses a clever bit of browser technology to give your site beautifully smooth page transitions — the kind of slick experience…
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Why Aren’t Domain Names Free?
You’ve got a brilliant idea, you’re ready to launch a website, and then it hits you: you need to pay for a domain name. Twelve pounds, twenty dollars, whatever the currency. But why? Why are we paying for something that sounds like it should just exist online, freely available like fresh air? It’s a fair…
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How AI Coding Apps Like Lovable and Bolt Actually Work (Explained for non-technies)
AI tools that build websites or apps from a single prompt, like Lovable or Bolt, can feel almost magical. You type something like “Build me a travel blog,” and seconds later, you’re looking at a working website. But what’s really going on behind the scenes?Surprisingly, the magic isn’t just about the AI getting smarter. It’s…
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PootleWriter Just Got a Major Upgrade: Image Support Is Here 🚀
Say hello to drag-and-drop image uploads in PootleWriter – fully optimized and seamlessly integrated with WordPress. New Features Upload to WordPress Media LibraryDrop an image, and it’s instantly uploaded to your WordPress site. Filenames and alt text? Automatically cleaned and added. Drag-and-Drop SimplicityDrag images straight into the editor. You’ll see a blue dashed border and…
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PootleWriter Update: WordPress Categories, Markdown Support, and Optional Draft Posting
We’ve just shipped a new PootleWriter update with three powerful improvements to streamline your writing and publishing workflow. WordPress Categories — Automatically PulledPootleWriter now connects directly to your WordPress site and automatically pulls your existing categories using the WordPress REST API. Just pick the right category from a dropdown — no need to remember or…
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My Cat is a Criminal, the Internet is a Dumpster Fire, and I Rode a Train Through Hell
Let me tell you about my cat, Pom. Pom is technically a domestic animal, in the same way that lava is technically a building material. She is a small, fluffy tyrant with zero regard for international law, property rights, or upholstery. She looks like something you'd see on a greeting card, but do not be…
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Why you should learn Storytelling deeply in 2025
There’s that famous quote: “There’s the story you tell yourself, and the story the world tells about you.”Usually seen in moody typeface over a photo of someone hiking through fog, followed by a podcast ad. But behind the bumper sticker philosophy is something weird and true: we can’t stop telling stories. We explain life through…
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Why Over a Million People Paid to Walk Through a Muddy Tunnel
The other night I was watching a documentary on Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Yes, I know how that sounds. But look, it was either that or scroll aimlessly on my phone for an hour while trying to avoid buying another guitar. So, documentary it was. And then this amazing fact popped out. Brunel, the legendary Victorian…
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How This One Episode of Clarkson’s Farm Can Teach You More About Marketing Than a £10,000 MBA
About 20 years ago, I started an MBA. I was one of those ambitious, eager-to-learn types — until the company sponsoring me went spectacularly bust halfway through the first module. No more funding. No more textbooks. Just me, a partially digested SWOT analysis, and a sudden abundance of free evenings. Back then, I thought I’d…
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We Need to Talk About My Friend Jamie… No, Not Me
I have a friend called Jamie. No, not me. A different Jamie. I realize that’s confusing. This is like that time in school when there were two boys named Timothy and the teacher tried calling one of them “Timothy 2” to differentiate, and he immediately burst into tears. Anyway, Jamie (not me) is a walking,…
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The WordPress Speed Build at WordCamp EU in Basel 2025
What happens when two brilliant WordPress developers get just 30 minutes to recreate a completely ridiculous website design? At WordCamp EU’s Speed Build challenge, Fabian Kägy and Ellen Bauer were handed a design inspired by bubblegum, brutalism, and bonbons—and things got wonderfully weird. Here’s how it went down.
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I Went to WordCamp EU and Spent Three Days in My Hotel Room… Here’s What I Learned
There’s a quote by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that goes:“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Clearly, Blaise never tried doing this at a WordCamp. Or while slightly ill. Or while watching Interstellar in a hotel bed, drifting in and out of consciousness and wondering if…
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What Brands Still Don’t Get About YouTube
After making over 500 YouTube videos and growing a channel to 150,000 subscribers, I’ve noticed a pattern. Especially with brands. They’re trying too hard to be perfect. Polished lighting. Studio voiceovers. Scripted everything. Sleek, corporate-designed animations. It looks great. But it doesn’t work. Not on YouTube. Because on YouTube, polish doesn’t build trust. In fact,…
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How to Build a CSS-Only Carousel in WordPress Gutenberg with Zero JavaScript
Creating an accessible, functional, and beautiful carousel in WordPress has traditionally meant reaching for a plugin—or writing custom JavaScript. But not anymore. Thanks to a new CSS spec, CSS Overflow Module Level 5, we can now build fully accessible carousels using nothing but HTML and CSS. And in this tutorial, I’ll show you how to…
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When AI Avatars Look (and Sound) Like Us — What Happens Next?
One of the areas we’re exploring at Automattic is how generative AI might help us improve video content — for support, training, and product demos. And one of the most fascinating frontiers is AI avatars: realistic video presenters created entirely by machines, sometimes based on real people. I wrote about this recently in an article,…