WordPress

The short video below shows me using WordPress Playground with WebMCP to add a hamburger menu to a website. It’s pretty cool: I can ask AI to work on the site, see the results in my browser, and keep shaping things through conversation. Want to try it yourself? Open the latest ChatGPT desktop app, switch…

I’ve been experimenting with what a Canva-like editing experience might look like in WordPress. The hard part is not the dragging. It is turning what you dragged into a real WordPress page.

Until now, most generative AI has been making new versions of things we already understand. AI images are still images. AI music is still music. AI video is still video. But what happens when AI makes a type of media that couldn’t really exist before AI? I think we might have just seen the first…

I love Europe. I should probably establish that before proceeding. But I have just spent roughly four hours of my life queuing at Geneva Airport, which gives a man plenty of time to contemplate European technology policy, his own mortality, and whether it would be quicker simply to walk back to England. The cause was…

I’ve noticed there are basically two modes a company can operate in. Customer-centric mode. And engineering-centric mode. Most great businesses start in the first one. Someone sees a problem. A real person has something annoying, expensive, slow, painful or downright ridiculous happening in their life, and the company decides to fix it. The early conversations…

Over the years I’ve trained more than 5,000 people face-to-face, so getting back in a room with beginners at WordCamp US in Phoenix today was a real joy. And the results were pretty great. Across 18 learners, average confidence in the core WordPress skills we covered jumped from 2.67 → 4.16. 15/18 improved and nobody…

Over the past year, I’ve been developing a new approach to educational content for YouTube, X and LinkedIn in the age of AI. The approach is pretty simple: build something exciting, show it working, then teach people exactly how I did it. Less theory about what AI might make possible. More: here’s what I built, here’s…

Before we go any further, skip to 0:50 in the video below. Pay attention to the pre-chorus. Your ears will probably want the chord sequence to move on long before ABBA let it. That’s exactly the point. I play in an indie rock band called Shenanigans. We’re the sort of band that plays Radiohead, Nirvana,…

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…

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…

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…