WP Builds

The conversation focused on Niels Arts and his work on Clonable, a SaaS solution for managing multilingual websites. One concept discussed was how Clonable allows site owners to create separate versions of their websites in different languages, keeping them synchronised while permitting specific local changes. We also chatted about the technical method of scraping and translating site content automatically, rather than relying solely on plugins. The discussion explored translation quality, handling of updates, plugin integrations, pricing tiers, and the practical realities of running international websites.

Join Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Cami MacNamara, Alex Standiford. The conversation focused on recent developments in the WordPress ecosystem, including highlights from version 7.1, a new accessibility community initiative, and a modern revamp of the WordPress admin using AI. The discussion explored WordCamp events, educational initiatives, and marketing strategies for agencies and freelancers, emphasizing community engagement and business resilience. Several points were raised, including client feedback tools, plugin analytics, and innovative approaches in AI and content management. Insights into imposter syndrome, contributor retention, and the impact of large-scale email campaigns rounded out the key themes for web professionals working with WordPress.

Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne McCarthy joined this “At The Core” episode to highlight what's ahead in WordPress 7.1. Anne, as release lead, outlined major features like responsive styling, persistent admin bar, and improved inline notes. Birgit emphasised practical upgrades such as the new image crop modal and customisable viewports. Both guests celebrated the retention of the Classic Block after strong community feedback. Anne also covered the collaborative editing outreach effort, while Birgit explained developer-focused changes and the importance of testing. Together, Birgit and Anne championed community transparency, robust security, and a smoother WordPress core experience. All very cool!

Today were talking about the creation and evolution of the Slidy Panel WordPress plugin, designed to offer customisable slide-in panels for block-based sites. We discussed the challenge of plugin naming and adapting to block directory requirements, and the impact of AI on the web development industry. We also got into the need for human expertise in bespoke website creation. Towards the end, we explored agency life, plugin marketing, and the necessity of adaptability in a changing digital landscape. As always, there's some humour thrown in, this time around careers, collectibles, and the unpredictable future of WordPress professionals.

The conversation focused on Amber Hinds’ personal journey restoring faith in the WordPress community during challenging times. A key theme was how Amber’s Accessibility Checker plugin has succeeded thanks to her relentless long-term effort, deep expertise in accessibility, and a strategic focus on higher-budget clients like agencies and enterprises. The discussion explored Amber’s commitment to intentional marketing, collaborative teamwork, and showing up consistently rather than looking for quick fixes. Amber shared what marketing tactics worked for her, what she chose to leave behind, and the importance of playing the long game to build lasting WordPress product success.

Join Nathan Wrigley, Sé Reed, Marc Benzakein, Alex Standiford. The conversation focused on current trends in the WordPress ecosystem, including the decision to retain the classic block, the release of an open source documentary, and concerns over declining plugin sales and community participation. A key theme that emerged was the shifting landscape caused by AI and changing community dynamics, with discussions on WordCamp US attendance, regional events, and plugin market challenges. The discussion explored alternatives to Meetup.com, highlighted the Yoast Community Fund recipient, and mentioned new tools like GatherPress and Fluent Player. Several points were raised, including the importance of open source, discoverability, and adapting to changing user needs.

Well this is a different episode from the normal things we get into on WP Builds. It's about the intersection of human creativity and AI, sparked by a handmade zine (I did not know what that was) titled "Human Creativity in the Age of AI." Tess talks about the emotional and practical significance of creative processes versus AI-generated output. We explore how AI is 'democratising' access to creative tools, the shifting definition of art, and the ethical concerns around replacing human skills. Then there's the whole thing about the value of human ideas, imperfection, and individuality, even as AI capabilities rapidly advance and reshape artistic expression. Like I say, not your typical WP Builds podcast episode, but fun nonetheless!

Today, the podcast is focused on the practical and personal impact of AI in daily workflows and business operations. One theme that emerged was the creation of a custom AI-powered journaling and knowledge management system, Navigator, used for personal insights, team collaboration, and onboarding. The discussion explored how AI provides a “second brain,” enhances memory, and enables more intentional business strategies. Several points were raised, including privacy concerns, the evolution of AI in work life, and its transformative effect on team communication and productivity. The episode highlighted both the opportunities and challenges posed by integrating AI deeply into business processes.

The conversation focused on WordPress 7.0’s release, highlighting major features such as the new WP AI client, a modernised dashboard, improved revision tracking, enhanced gallery blocks with lightbox effects, and refined responsive controls. We also get into the delay and removal of collaborative editing due to technical challenges, discussion on performance, host involvement, and future release cycles. The discussion explored Automattic’s “radical speed month,” new browser extensions, plugin updates, and ongoing relevance of classic themes. Several points were raised, including community engagement in testing, leadership changes in the AI team, upcoming events, and the ever-present topic of the weather!

Nathan Wrigley interviews Lovekesh Kumar, a WordPress engineer at rtCamp, about WPM, a new, secure, Go-based package manager for WordPress plugins and themes. Lovekesh explains the pain points of managing plugins in enterprise environments, especially regarding premium plugins and security. WPM centralises package management, resolves dependencies, handles private and public plugins, and verifies packages with cryptographic signatures. The episode covers the motivation behind WPM, its features, adoption process, and its focus on improving supply chain security and workflow efficiency for WordPress developers and agencies.

Nathan Wrigley interviews James Welbes, about his journey in the WordPress space, his early frustrations and eventual embrace of WordPress, and the transformative impact of AI on web development. They discuss the rapid evolution of AI, its effect on productivity, and the culture shifts occurring as people interact more with AI tools. James shares his experiences building apps with AI, the changing value of WordPress, and trends of developers moving away from traditional platforms. The episode explores the societal and psychological aspects of AI while reflecting on the fast-changing tech landscape.

Some of us love working with CSS. It's fun, pretty easy to learn, and gets the job done. Others… not so much. It's boring, hard to master, and you end up doing things incorrectly all the time! Over the years, there's been many attempts to make CSS easier to write and work with… literally dozens. Today on the show we have Kevin Geary, the founder of Automatic CSS (ACSS), which is a utility framework for WordPress page builders. Its aim is to make modern CSS available for all to use, and to implement this inside of the tools that you're already using - Page Builders, and to grow the number of page builders which they support. Currently, they cover Oxygen and Bricks, but hope to grow to cover Gutenberg, Zion Builder and Cwicly. The idea is that they do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, so that much of the regular work that you might have to create right at the start of a project is taken care of. We get into what the project can do and how it can save you time. What can it control and how 'heavy' it is, or isn't?

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 20th February 2023.

We asked ChatGPT the question "could artificial intelligence (A.I.) kill the web design industry?". This is what we got back... "It is unlikely that artificial intelligence (A.I.) will completely kill the web design industry. While A.I. and automation tools may be able to handle certain aspects of web design, it is unlikely that they will be able to fully replace the creativity and problem-solving skills of human web designers. Web design involves more than just technical skills; it also requires an understanding of user experience, branding, and visual design principles. These are areas where A.I. may not be able to fully replace human designers." Did you read all of the words like 'unlikely', fully replace' in that sentence? We're doomed! Seriously though, there are going to be some pretty radical shifts in how we build websites in the years to come and some of that shifting will be to do with A.I. and the abilities it brings to bear. Find out what we think in the podcast this week.

So this is all about AI, so buckle up as it's all the hotness! It's not the usual AI hotness though, because this podcast is not about ChatGPT and how it'll likely break the world. No, this is about how you can use AI to create works of art for your WordPress website, or for any reason, in fact. I interviewed Josh Dailey and Aaron Edwards, who have a service called Imajinn. It's an AI for creating images and there's a WordPress plugin which allows you to do all the magic in the WordPress admin, which is nice. We spend some time at the start getting to know Josh and Aaron and their background in the WordPress space, which, as you'll hear, is really rather extensive. We then move onto the fascinating subject of how AI art is actually created. I've got to say that I'm pretty blown away with how it all works. It's basically guessing pixel-by-pixel what should come next. It all starts with a prompt, and then the AI tries to work out what the next layer of pixels should be, and it keeps spreading out like this until it decides that it's done enough. Think ripples on a pond. Hey presto, instant (almost) artwork! Is this scary or just the best thing ever? Listen to the podcast and leave a comment to tell us your thoughts.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 30th January 2023.

Welcome to the last episode (sigh) in our Business Bootcamp series. Over the last year, we have been attempting to question everything we know about building WordPress sites and running a web design businesses. We looked at the entire process, from meeting our first client to helping them to support their site. We’ve tried to contrast approaches by looking at the traditional project (waterfall) where we are hired to build the finished (website) "product", and an agile approach, where we will try to use online SEO and UX data gathered, to iteratively improve the site as an ongoing collaboration with the client. Here we have set ourselves a few questions in an attempt to sum up what we have learned over this series and, more generally, our time in the website building industry. It's been a fun ride!

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 9th January 2022.

On the podcast today we have Zach Swinehart in the first of an (unexpectedly) two-part episode. We talked for so long that I decided it was best as two episodes instead of a really long single episode. "Productivity hacks" feel a bit like snake oil to me at this point. We've all heard a million of them and they never seem to work. Today's episode should affect your productivity. It's not a "weird productivity tip that your doctor does not want you to know about". Instead, it's a fundamental approach that we can take to our work as designers and developers to prioritise high-quality focus on the right stuff. Zach is going to go deep on the concept of "strategic deep work" and how you can leverage it to really get meaningful results in your freelancing business. Whether you're a soloist freelancer or you're trying to scale your agency, you'll get something out of this episode.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 12th December 2022.

So we have Katie Keith on the podcast today to talk about what they're doing over at Barn2 plugins. First off, we tackle the history of the company, and importantly, why they have such a peculiar name! We then get into their journey into the WooCommerce space and how that's enabled them to grow into the small, but mighty team that they are today. We then list out some of their more popular plugins and Katie explains what each one does and when you might need to deploy it. Lastly, we get into acquisitions. The WordPress space has been literally full of them over the last couple of years and WooCommerce plugins have been fairly popular 'buys' for some of the bigger players. Katie talks about this and how they wish to stay the course and keep the business going nuder their own steam.

So you're in the business of selling WordPress websites? If you are in that business, then I can guarantee you that there's more money to be made than just getting the site done and then moving on. Today it's all about the upsells that we might offer. We go through a list of things that we've tried in the past, some of which were profitable and easy to do, others of which were hard and lost us money. It's a lottery to be honest! Things that one person excels at, others might be loathed to do. Website hosting, email hosting, design, custom development, social media, content creation, SEO, optimisation... I could go on. In fact, I (we) do in the episode today. Have a listen and then head over to the post and leave us a comment.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 21st November 2022.

Welcome to another in the Business Bootcamp series where we relearn everything we know about building WP sites and running a web design business from start to finish. Today we're talking about the way that hosting has changed over the years. In much the same way that you look at a website from 1999 and wonder how that was ever allowed to exist, the same is true for the technology stack that is hosting our WordPress websites. Perhaps, back in the day, you ran servers of your own in your office or house. You then likely moved to something like shared hosting and a VPS. Now we've got managed WordPress hosting companies and cloud services which allow to spin up servers in an instant with just the resources we need. Add to that the interest in headless WordPress, and well, we've got a show on our hands and plenty to talk about.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 31st October 2022.

On the podcast today we have Eric Karkovack. He's been in the WordPress space for ages and contributes in a whole variety of ways. I've been wanting to get him on the show for ages, but our calendars kept colliding, until today! We talk about two, not related, subjects. The first is WebP images, and the second is canonical plugins. You might not have heard of WebP images, but they're all the rage! They are / were a project which came out of Google, and their intention was to create a new image format which would create images of high quality, but of a smaller file size. They've not yet made it into WordPress Core. Why is that? We also talk about 'Canonical Plugins' which is a proposal (see the links below in the show notes on the website) to increase the footprint of what WordPress can do, without increasing the footprint of what WordPress can do. That makes sense, right?!?! These canonical plugins would offer some pretty essential features, they would be tested thoroughly with WordPress Core versions, would receive frequent updates and therefore would have kudos; they're more or less guaranteed to work out of the box. Eric and I get into this all as well...

We all do maintenance for our WordPress website clients, right? But what do you cover and what does a client expect? That's the basis of the podcast today... There are many things that you 'could' cover, but many things that perhaps don't want to. Perhaps you know that you're not a security expert, or that configuring your server is a little out of scope. So how do you decide what's in and what's out? Also, we're in an era of 'no-code'. Clients are constantly being bombarded by messages saying that you can have a website which you can build yourself with no experience. How does this play into the equation of what a client will expect from you? Solutions like Wix and Squarespace make this promise a reality and it's no doubt a conversation that you're going to need to combat at some point. Join us on the podcast today to see what we think about this and what we've done in the past...

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 17th October 2022.

It's no secret that the world is adopting the model of subscription pricing. If you're my age, then you remember a time when almost nothing was based upon subscriptions. The technology simply made it impractical; there were no credit cards, the internet did not exist, and you just didn't see examples around you. Fast forward (a few decades!), and now they're everywhere. The banking / payments systems have all been built to make this trivial to set up and deploy to the entire world over the internet. WooCommerce has a plugin called WooCommerce Subscriptions which will allow you to get started, but it's limited in what it can do. Enter Subscription Force, a new WordPress plugin which will put your subscriptions on a different level. You can do so much with this, truly. Today we interview Marius Vetrici and Andrei Haret, who are behind Subscription Force to hear what it's all about and how it works.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 10th October 2022.

So voice enabled home are now a thing. It's pretty likely that if you don't have a voice enabled device now, you will at some point in the near future. You speak, and they respond. It's pretty cool. But you might have noticed that there are limits to what they can do, and there are ways you learn to speak to these devices to get the best out of them. It's a bit like how you use Google. You don't type in ordinary language; you use Google specific language. What if it were possible to have the capabilities that voice enabled devices bring to the internet to a WordPress website? That would be cool, right? It would be, but the downside is that it's really rather hard to make all of this work, and that's where Convoworks steps in. They've got a GUI to make the job of doing all of this as easy as possible. Tihomir Dmitrović is on the podcast today to explain how it works, when you might use it and how it can benefit your website. Check it out.

Menus are really rather important, although really underrated. They are, after all, the way that we make our way around the websites that we visit. So how should we think about them? At what point to they get discussed (if at all) in the website building process? There's more than you might think to this conversation... what type of menu works best, how do we add accessibility options into our menus, how do we create our menus and are we going to be using the new capabilities when WordPress' Full Site Editing enables us to handle the styling of our menus in WordPress core? Have a listen to the podcast and don't forget to drop a comment if you think that we got anything wrong! Go listen...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 7th June 2021

Check out the new Infinite Uploads plugin on the WP Builds podcast today. I'm joined by co-founder, Josh Dailey, who explains what it's all about, which is making your site faster. It sucks up your WordPress Media Library files and puts them in their cloud and serves them from +50 global points of presence... it all looks and behaves the same, it all happens in the background. We get into their tech stack and how they make sure that your media is safe and served up quickly. We also talk about their scalable pricing model and how they avoid vendor lock in by making it easy to download your files at any time. So if you're interested in making your website media load quickly, this is a must listen...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 31st May 2021

Today we talk about WordPress website page speed and why this is important, how you can measure it and some ideas about what you can do to improve it. There's quite a lot to say about this, and it's really timely with Google's Core Web Vitals (CWV) coming on-stream in the near future. We talk about what CWV is and what it's measuring, what WordPress loads out of the box, what tools you can use to measure your website page speed as well as what plugins you might consider to address any bottlenecks that you discover. How does hosting play into all this as well. As I say, there's a lot of ground to cover, so go check out the podcast to see what we think...

This week's WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 24th May 2021

PeachPay is a new 1-click-checkout option for your WooCommerce store. It aims to remove some of the friction of getting people to click the 'buy now' button by removing multiple steps for people who've used PeachPay before. We talk about how it works, debunk some myths, and discuss why you might want to think about add this to your WooCommerce website. If you build eCommerce websites for clients, you need to know about this solution and how it could improve their sales. Go listen...

This week's WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 17th May 2021

In this episode of the podcast we asked you submit what you thought were some Killer Tips for creating your WordPress websites, and you did not disappoint! So there's loads of useful little nuggets of information in here, many of them might be new to you. It never ceases to amaze me just how my processes differ from other people doing the exact same job, and how much I could learn from other WordPress professionals. Well in this episode of the podcast, we kinda make that possible! Go check it out!

This week's WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 10th May 2021

In today’s world there is no difference between “digital” and “physical” products insofar as the transactional engine of your website is concerned. While it may have been true in the past that certain products like EDD were focused on capabilities for those who sell digitally licensed subscription software, that is no longer a factor, as the capability exists for WooCommerce to do everything. Since WooCommerce is one of the most popular plugins in the entire WordPress ecosystem, why “wouldn’t” anyone use it for all purposes? And that's what the podcast is about today, a plugin called LaunchFlows which will help you supercharge your WooCommerce store. Go listen...

This week's WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 3rd May 2021

This episode is about all the many, many, many jobs that you do each and every time you build a WordPress website for yourself or for a client. There really are so many! I'm not too sure that I do quite as much as David does, because, as you'll hear, he's does rather a lot. From setting hosting and email, from forms to security, this episode could have gone on for a long time. Maybe you treat each project individually, or have a template that you keep coming back to. Go listen to the podcast today and tell us what you think...

I've often thought about building my WordPress websites on the one day model, it's got so much going for it. I've heard stories of quite a few people who are managing this very effectively. However, it's always been something that I've associated with a single freelancer. I'd always assumed that the margins were pretty tight, and therefore most likely to work with one person. Well, Candy Phelps is on the podcast today to tell me (and you) otherwise! She's built a business creating websites in a day with a team, and, as you might have guessed, it's all about the process. If you get the process right from the start, you can make this work, as you'll have all your ducks in a row, so that there's no time wasted and every member of your team know what to do and when to do it. It's pretty interesting to see how this all hangs together. Go listen...

This week's WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 19th April 2021

The web is made up of Pictures and Words. Some of those pictures are moving (video), but it's basically just those two things. We have easy ways to deal with putting photos and other kinds of images onto our WordPress websites with the features that are baked in, but there's so much more to this topic. What kind of images are the best to use? How many thumbnail sizes should we be storing? Should we be serving our images over a CDN? Is it a good idea to compress our images so that they make a more lean loading experience? Where can we source our images? What software is good for quick alterations to the images that we've got. Honestly, there are a dozen more questions, but you get the idea that there's a lot more to images than meets the eye. Go listen to the podcast to find out more...

This week's WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 12th April 2021

Having a newsletter is one of the best ways that you can communicate with an audience. In fact, I'd go as far as to say, that it's the best. There's no third-party platform involved. You are communicating with people who have signed up, and therefore really want to get your content. But, it can be a dull job keeping the content flowing. Today we learn about a SaaS platform which might just make that job a lot less painful. I've started to use it and it's shaved hours out of my week. Go listen to the podcast today to find out more...

This week's WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 5th April 2021