What if you opened WordPress and all you saw was a blank page, a blinking cursor, and room to think?
That’s the question behind Write — a free WordPress plugin and proof of concept that reimagines the publishing experience from the ground up, designed purely for writers.
Take Write for a spin (WordPress Playground link)
The problem
WordPress is extraordinary software. But when you sit down to write a blog post, you’re greeted by a dashboard, a sidebar, an admin bar, a block inserter, a settings panel, and dozens of options that have nothing to do with the words you’re about to put down. For writers — especially those who aren’t developers — it’s a lot of visual noise between you and a blank page.
Write strips all of that away.
Full-screen by default
When you navigate to /write/ on your site, you get a completely clean page. A title field at the top. A content area below it. A thin separator between them. That’s it. No sidebar. No block inserter. The admin bar slides away the moment you start typing, so the entire screen belongs to your words.
This isn’t a “distraction-free mode” bolted onto an existing interface. The writing page is its own standalone template — it doesn’t use your theme at all. It’s a blank canvas with considered typography, generous whitespace, and nothing else.
Everything appears when you need it
Select some text and a floating toolbar appears right next to your selection — heading, bold, italic, quote, link, and image. Make your choice and it disappears. The toolbar never sits there staring at you. It exists only in the moment you need it.
Type / on a new line and a slash command menu appears — just like in the block editor. Heading, image, video, quote, divider. Navigate with Tab and arrow keys, press Enter to insert. The menu filters as you type, so /h jumps straight to heading. It’s fast, keyboard-driven, and accessible.
Categories? They’re tucked away behind a small icon in the bottom corner. Tap it, toggle the ones you want, tap away to close. They never clutter the writing space.
Images and video, without the friction
Click the image icon or type /image and a clean modal opens. Upload a file — you’ll see a water-fill animation as it uploads and a preview when it’s done — or paste a URL. Add alt text. Optionally set it as the featured image. Click insert. The image appears inline in your post.
Hover over any image in your post and you get three options: delete it, add alt text, or write a caption. All inline, all without leaving the page.
Videos work the same way. Type /video, paste a YouTube or Vimeo URL, and it embeds inline with a responsive 16:9 player. It saves as a proper wp:embed block in the backend.
Designed for calmness
Every design decision in Write prioritises calm. The admin bar slides away when you start writing. The toolbar only appears on text selection. Modals use a soft backdrop blur. The colour palette is minimal — mostly white, with a single blue accent. The custom caret is a gentle blue. Text selection uses a soft highlight instead of the harsh default.
If you try to leave with unsaved work, you don’t get a browser alert — you get a gentle modal asking if you want to keep writing or leave. Even the small things are considered.
Proper WordPress blocks under the hood
This isn’t a separate system. When you publish or save a draft, Write converts your content into proper WordPress block markup — core/paragraph, core/heading, core/image, core/quote, core/embed. Open the post in the block editor and everything is there, correctly structured. You can go back and forth between Write and the block editor without losing anything.
You can also edit existing posts. Visit any post on your site and click “Edit Post” in the toolbar to open it in Write. The title, content, and categories all load in, and the button changes from “Publish” to “Update”.
Built on the Interactivity API
Write is built entirely on the WordPress Interactivity API. All the reactive UI — toolbar visibility, saving state, modal show/hide, category toggles, slash menu filtering — is handled through data-wp-interactive directives and a single JavaScript store module. There’s no React, no build step, no node_modules. The entire plugin is three files: one PHP, one JS, one CSS.
The whole thing was built with Claude Code inside WordPress Studio — from the first line of code to the finished plugin.
Free and open
Write is free and open source. It’s a proof of concept — an exploration of what WordPress could feel like if every decision was made with writers in mind. It’s not trying to replace the block editor. It’s asking a question: what’s the minimum interface needed to write something beautiful?
What would you change?
This is very much a v1. There are rough edges, things to add, and probably things to remove. That’s the point — it’s a starting conversation, not a finished product.
What would make this better for you? What would you add? More importantly — what would you take away? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Leave a Reply