Jamie Marsland
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The missing layer in WordPress
Imagine asking your WordPress site: Which services don’t have testimonials? Which products mention pricing but don’t explain delivery? Summarise everything we offer for beginners. Show me every product launch we’ve announced in the past two years. Generate a newsletter from this month’s company announcements. Today, WordPress can’t answer those questions. It can store content. It…
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What opens up once we have a Schema?
In my last post, I explored the idea of creating a schema layer on top of AI-generated HTML. The more I think about it, the more I believe the schema is the interesting part. Not because it helps WooCommerce or Jetpack Forms integrate with AI-generated pages, although it does. What’s interesting is everything that becomes…
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The Schema Bit
The next step isn’t asking AI to write better HTML. It’s helping WordPress understand the HTML people already paste in. AI might generate this: <h1>Premium Coffee Mug</h1> <p>£19.99</p> <button>Add to Cart</button> A person knows what that means. WordPress doesn’t. So the plugin needs to create a schema behind the scenes: { “component”: “woo-product”, …
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What if HTML became the interface and WordPress became the engine?
I’ve been thinking about where my Visual HTML Editor could go next. Right now, the plugin solves a simple problem: AI is incredibly good at generating HTML, but HTML isn’t particularly friendly for most WordPress users to edit. The plugin sits in the middle. AI creates the layout, and users can safely edit text, images,…
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AI Makes It Harder Sometimes to Get Traction
When I was running WordPress courses, someone once copied my website almost word for word. They copied the headlines, the structure, the sales copy, the lot. They were so lazy they even copied my phone number. So I started getting calls from people trying to book courses through their website, which was both annoying and…
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Turn Any WordPress Playground Into a Guided Education Experience
If you’ve ever shared a WordPress Playground link and watched someone wonder where to click next, this is for you. I’ve been experimenting with a new feature on pootleplayground.com called Guided Tours. Here’s a live example: https://pootleplayground.com/p/5ai0uv Open the link and you’ll be guided through WordPress step by step. The idea is simple: instead of…
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The Push-Pull of Government Running Things Really Badly
Or: Why British Government Is Basically a Washing Machine Stuck on Spin Cycle Every few years, a politician stands at a lectern, looks serious, and announces that power is going to be devolved. This week it was Andy Burnham. The speech is usually accompanied by words like local empowerment, community leadership, decision-making closer to the…
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Meet the Distraction-Free Writer — a calm place to write, right inside WordPress
WordPress is a brilliant publishing platform, but let’s be honest about the writing experience: the moment you click “Add New Post” you’re staring at admin bars, sidebars, settings panels, block inserters, and a dozen things competing for your attention. None of that helps you write. It helps you configure. Jamie’s Distraction-Free Writer strips all of…
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AI Designs It. WordPress Runs It.
Over the past few months I've been exploring a simple idea. AI has become remarkably good at generating HTML. Not just acceptable HTML, but genuinely beautiful, well-structured landing pages that would have taken me hours to build by hand. I've found myself reaching for ChatGPT to design pages more often than traditional page builders. The…
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We Need Better Stories, Not Just More Videos
I've spent the last five years making WordPress videos. For a long time, the formula was fairly simple. Build something useful, make a good tutorial, publish it, and people would watch. I don't think that's true anymore. The problem isn't that people have stopped caring about websites. The problem is that attention has become much…
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Introducing Jamie’s Visual HTML Editor
I’ve just released a new free plugin on WordPress.org, and I’m pretty excited about it: Jamie’s Visual HTML Editor. If you’ve ever pasted a chunk of HTML into the WordPress Custom HTML block, you know the pain. The markup just sits there as raw code, and the only way to change a headline or swap…
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WordPress Block Themes Were Made for AI
I rebuilt my wife’s yoga website with ChatGPT last night, and it left me wondering whether block themes were made for AI. A few days ago I wrote an article called AI Is Extremely Good at HTML, and Maybe We Should Stop Fighting That. The basic argument was simple. AI has become remarkably good at…
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Using ChatGPT as a WordPress Page Builder
ChatGPT might be the best WordPress page builder I’ve ever used. Which sounds ridiculous. But I’m not sure it is. Last night, I rebuilt my wife’s yoga studio website using ChatGPT and WordPress. The reason it worked so well is speed of creative iteration. Inside one chat, I can work with something that feels like…
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Pressship: The Easiest Way to Publish a WordPress Plugin to WordPress.org
Publishing a plugin to the WordPress.org directory has a reputation for being fiddly — and that reputation is earned. You have to zip your files in exactly the right shape, hand-check a readme.txt against rules you can’t see, install developer tools to run the official “Plugin Check,” fill in a web form, and — once…
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Pootlewriter update: Introducing Writing Insights Mode
I just shipped a new feature in PootleWriter that I’ve been wanting for a while: Writing Insights Mode. It’s a real-time writing analysis tool built directly into the editor — no AI, no external API calls, no text rewriting. Just honest, rule-based feedback about what you wrote. What it does Toggle it on with the…
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We Ran a Huge Social Experiment on a Whole Generation. It Turned Out to Be Terrible
Today, the UK government announced plans to ban social media for under-16s. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the restrictions are needed to protect children’s wellbeing and mental health. Slightly to my own surprise, I think they are right. This is awkward for me. I am a huge free speech advocate. If something is legal, broadly…
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WordPress Is the Smartest Long-Term Bet in an AI World
The problem with AI builders is not the first demo. It is the third rebuild. I have used Lovable, Bolt, Replit and Base44 a lot. They are brilliant at getting you from idea to working prototype quickly. You describe the app, it creates the interface, wires up the logic, adds authentication, connects a database, and…
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The Beach: An AI Video Experiment
A quick note on how I made this. This was a bit of an experiment and very much a rough first pass. I used ChatGPT to create the images and ElevenLabs for the voiceover, mainly to explore what this kind of storytelling workflow might look like. I was curious whether something simple, quiet, and slightly…
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The Non-Technical Person’s Vibe Coding Cheat Sheet for WordPress
If you are a non-technical but want to build stuff in WordPress with AI, bookmark this. This is the cheat sheet I wish I had when I started vibe coding. The trick is simple: Know what to ask AI to use. After reading this, you’ll know when to ask for blocks, plugins, the REST API,…
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Tame the Blocks: Brand Control for the WordPress Editor (No Theme Hacking Required)
The block editor is powerful. Sometimes too powerful. Give ten editors a colour picker and you’ll get eleven shades of “brand blue”. Tame the Blocks is a free plugin that puts you back in charge: one settings page that controls how the WordPress editor looks, behaves, and what your team can and can’t touch. Try…