WordPress

When most people see Gogh, they see a drag-and-drop page builder. That's understandable. It's the most visible part of the project. But if you zoom out, I think there's a much bigger story emerging. It's not really about building another page builder. It's about creating a bridge, and potentially, a platform. AI Already Speaks HTML…

I was curious whether WordPress Site Editor is something a complete beginner could realistically pick up, so I asked Claude to review the experience through the eyes of someone completely new to WordPress. The prompt was simple: forget everything you know about WordPress, start with a blank site, and document every point of confusion, every…

I love WordPress block themes. I think they're one of the biggest technical achievements in WordPress over the last decade. They give us consistency, flexibility, global styles, design systems, and an incredible amount of control. As someone building on top of WordPress every day, I wouldn't want to go back. But… I'm increasingly convinced that…

Eleven days ago I set myself a weekend challenge: build “Canva for WordPress.” Try a live demo here Not another page builder. A page builder on top of Gutenberg that a complete beginner could use with zero training. The page is the canvas. You edit on the front end. You drag, resize, rotate, snap to…

If you’ve been thinking about moving from Wix to WordPress, you’ve probably discovered that most migration guides assume you know what FTP is, are happy exporting databases, or don’t mind wrestling with plugins. I don’t think that’s how most people want to build websites. Here’s the good news. If your website is primarily made up…

PootleWriter already exists. It already does what I originally set out to build: a fast, distraction-free writing experience with helpful insights that make editing easier. But over the last few weeks I've realised I've been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, "What feature should I add next?", I've started asking, "Why would someone come…

Over the weekend, Fable and I built a working MVP of a new WordPress page builder called Gogh. The idea is simple: make building WordPress pages feel as easy as Canva. Instead of wrestling with rows, columns, and nested blocks, you edit directly on the live page. Elements can be dragged, resized, rotated, reordered, and…

Satya Nadella (CEO Microsoft) shared an interesting idea this week about AI and what he calls the “Reverse Information Paradox.” The short version is that every time we use AI, we’re teaching it. Through our prompts, corrections, workflows, and feedback, we’re creating valuable knowledge. Reading it made me think about WordPress. For years, we’ve thought…

One of my favourite things about building for WordPress is how quickly a bit of feedback can turn into a real feature. This week it happened again. A few days ago, Alessio left a lovely review of Jamie’s Front-End Editor for Content Teams: “Very promising plugin, exactly the kind of thing I am looking for…

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…

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…

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”,  …

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

One small but very useful update to Pootle Playground: it now creates short links for WordPress Playground blueprints. If you haven’t come across it yet, Pootle Playground is a visual way to build and share WordPress Playground setups without touching JSON or config files. You can add plugins, themes, pages, menus, content, set landing pages,…

One of the big discoveries I’ve made when building apps is this: I didn’t need a database as often as I had assumed. If you’re building a small app, prototype, writing tool, calculator, planner, or something that mostly runs for one person, it is worth thinking about local storage first. If you’re building a small…