Planet — WordPress.org

in the editor, allowing for consistent styling with the front end (
74228
).
Blocks that have been fixed are:
Archives
Calendar
Latest Comments
RSS
Tag Cloud
Universal Text Alignment
[all]
Nearly all text blocks now support the standardized text-align block support system, including Paragraph, Button, Comment blocks, Heading, and Verse. Plus, text justify alignment is now available. See
tracking issue
to follow along on the progress (
60763
).
Cover Block Video Embeds
[site admin][end user]
For the Cover block this release comes with the ability to use embedded videos (like YouTube or Vimeo) as background videos in the Cover block, rather than being restricted to locally uploaded files. Offloading video to 3rd-party services helps reduce hosting and bandwidth costs. Also, the focal pointer is now available for fixed background. (
#73023
#74600
).
Gallery Block
Lightbox navigation
[site admin][end user]
The Gallery block’s “Enlarge on click” lightbox now lets you navigate between images. When you click a gallery image, back/next buttons appear so you can browse through the rest of the gallery without closing the lightbox. Keyboard navigation (arrow keys) and screen reader announcements are fully supported. It also works with swiping on mobile, however the swiping isn’t yet visual/animated.  (
62906
) and lightbox items still miss captions.
Content Tab in sidebar
[site admin][end user]
For fast access to Alt text box the sidebar of the Gallery block shows a new content tab in the sidebar.
Responsive Grid Block
[site admin][end user][theme builder]
The Grid block is now responsive even when you set a column count. Previously, you had to choose between setting a minimum column width (responsive, Auto mode) or a fixed column count (Manual mode)—a binary toggle that confused many users. Now you can set both: when you do, the column count becomes a
maximum
, and the grid scales down responsively based on your minimum column width.
You can set neither, either, or both—the block handles all combinations gracefully. The confusing Auto/Manual toggle is gone entirely, replaced by clearer “minimum width” and “columns” labels with a plain-language description explaining the relationship between the two controls.. (
73662
Heading block variations
[site admin][end user]
Each heading level (H1-H6) is now registered as a block variation on the Heading block. These do not appear in the inserter, but the change does add icons to the block’s sidebar for transforming it between variations (
73823
).
HTML Block Enhancement
[site admin] [themebuilder] [end user]
The HTML block was redesigned to work now as a modal-based editor featuring separate tabs for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Admin can now use it for more powerful customizations, when HTML JS and CSS work on a single block. (
73108
).
Image block inline editing and controls
[site admin][end user]
WordPress 7.0 comes with a revamp of the image editing feature in the editor. It’s now easier to crop, rotate or zoom in on a particular image corner. (
#72414
) (
#73277
).
Advanced Image Controls
[site admin][end user]
Image block now supports the focal point control and aspect ratio adjustments for wide and full alignments, plus reorganized inspector controls with a dedicated content tab.
#73115
#74519
#74201
Math Block Improvements
[end users][site admin]
LaTeX input now uses a monospaced font, and style options are available for better mathematical expression editing (
72557
73544
).
Paragraph
[all]
A new typography tool has been added for specifying the line indent of paragraph blocks (
73114
74889
). Users and theme creators can specify line indentation rules for a single paragraph block and also at global styles / theme.json level for all paragraph blocks. For global styles and theme.json, it’s possible to choose whether all paragraphs or only subsequent paragraphs are indented, which accounts for different indentation standards around the world.
The dev note on
the new
textIndent
block support
has all the details for developers working on blocks or themes.
The example code sets a default indent value of 1.5em globally for paragraphs:
JSON
settings
typography
textIndent
"true"
},
styles
blocks
core/paragraph
typography
textIndent
"1.5em"
More details can be learned in the Dev Note:
New Block Support: Text Indent (textIndent)
Columns in Paragraph blocks
[all]
Now that there is block support for typographical columns, the paragraph block can now handle text columns by default (
74656
).
On the front-end only, the Paragraph block now has a
.wp-block-paragraph
class. This change doesn’t affect global styles, which still use the
selector.(
71207
Query Loop Enhancements
[all]
Query loops now support excluding terms. When the block is locked it now hides design change and choose pattern options.
#73790
#74160
Verse Block, renamed to Poetry
[all]
The Verse Block has been renamed to Poetry block (
74722
) Also it now utilizes
border-box
for its
box-sizing
, which guards against overflow issues and should make it easier to style without additional custom CSS.
Admin / Workflow updates
Manage fonts for all themes in a dedicated page
[site admin][theme builder] [enterprise]
A dedicated Fonts page is now available under the Appearance menu for all themes. Until now, font management has lived deep inside Global Styles, requiring navigation through several panels to install or preview a font. This new standalone page lets block theme users browse, install, and manage their typography collection in one dedicated space.
Under the hood, this page is built on a new routing infrastructure for the Site Editor, designed to improve navigation and support new top-level pages in wp-admin. View transitions are now wired into this routing layer, providing early zoom/slide animations when navigating between pages (
73630
73876
73586
).
The Font Library and Global Styles also work with classic themes (
#73971
#73876
). Like the Media Library, you can access the Font Library as a modal or through a dedicated admin section—regardless of your theme type.
Command Palette in Adminbar
[all]
Instantly access all the tools you need with a single click using the
new Command Palette shortcut in the Omnibar
! In 7.0 Beta 5, logged-in editors will see a field with a ⌘K or Ctrl+K symbol in the upper admin bar that unfurls the command palette when clicked. The new command palette entry point streamlines navigation and customization, giving you full control from anywhere on your site – whether you’re editing, designing or just browsing plugins.
View Transitions
[all]
View transitions have been integrated into the WordPress admin in 7.0, enabling smooth transitions between screens.  The implementation for the front end is slated for the next WordPress 7.1 (
64470
) The result is a smoother page-to-page transitions using the CSS
View Transitions API
— no markup or JavaScript changes required, just a progressive enhancement you’ll notice immediately when navigating between admin screens.
Improved screens across WP-Admin
[all]
WordPress 7.0 is getting a CSS-only “coat-of-paint” visual reskin of the wp-admin, bringing the classic admin screens closer to the visual language of the block and site editors — no markup changes, no JavaScript, no functional changes, and all existing CSS class names and admin color schemes preserved. (
64308
New default color scheme: “Modern” replaces “Fresh” as the default admin color scheme (#
64546
Updated buttons and input fields: primary, secondary, and link buttons, plus text inputs, selects, checkboxes, and radio buttons, now align with the WordPress Design System (#
64547
Updated notices: info, warning, success, and error notices refreshed for clarity and consistency (#
64548
), including on the login screen
Updated cards and metaboxes: dashboard widgets and metaboxes get modernized styling (#
64549
New
wp-base-styles
stylesheet handle: consolidates admin color scheme CSS custom properties into a single reusable stylesheet, available across the admin and the block editor content iframe
Login and registration screens: the WordPress logo updated from blue to gray to match the new design, and scheme styles now apply to login, install, database repair, and upgrade screens
Developer Goodies
[developer][enterprise]
Client-side Abilities API
WordPress 7.0 ships a JavaScript counterpart to the server-side Abilities API introduced in 6.9. The
Client-Side Abilities API
arrives as two packages:
@wordpress/abilities
for pure state management usable in any project, and
@wordpress/core-abilities
, which auto-fetches server-registered abilities via the REST API. You can now register browser-only abilities — navigation, block insertion, and more — opening the door to browser agents, extensions, and WebMCP integrations directly in the client.
WP AI Client
WordPress 7.0 ships a built-in
AI Client
that gives your plugin a single, provider-agnostic PHP entry point —
wp_ai_client_prompt()
— for text, image, speech, and video generation. You describe what you need; WordPress routes it to whichever AI provider the site owner has configured via Settings > Connectors. Official provider plugins cover Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. No credential handling, no provider lock-in, and graceful feature detection before any UI is shown.
PHP-only block registration
Developers can now create simple blocks using only PHP. This is meant for blocks that only need server-side rendering and aren’t meant to be highly interactive. When possible this feature also auto-generates sidebars for user input for suitable attributes and design tools.
To do so, call
register_block_type
with the new
autoRegister
flag. A
render_callback
function must also be provided. (
71792
Dev note with all the details.
PHP-only block registration
Pattern Overrides for custom blocks
Since WordPress 6.5,
Pattern Overrides
let you create synced patterns where the layout stays consistent but specific content can change per instance. The catch? Only four core blocks supported it: Heading, Paragraph, Button, and Image.
Not anymore. Any block attribute that supports Block Bindings now supports Pattern Overrides by default. Block authors can opt in through the server-side
block_bindings_supported_attributes
filter. This closes
a long-requested enhancement
and opens up synced patterns to custom blocks (
73889
).
DataViews, Data Form components and Fields API
A substantial API update introduces new layouts, validation rules, grouping options, and picker improvements affecting plugins using
wordpress/dataviews
. The Dev Note has all the pertinent details:
DataViews, DataForm, et al. in WordPress 7.0
UI Primitives and Components
The WordPress UI package just got a significant update, adding multiple new components and tools to help developers create more polished and accessible interfaces for WordPress users.
A new dropdown menu for creating
standardized select controls
tooltip component
for displaying helpful hints when users hover over elements.
The building blocks for
creating form fields
with consistent styling and behavior.
A component that hides content
from visual display
while keeping it accessible to assistive technologies.
standardized button component
for creating consistent interactive elements.
Building blocks for grouping
related form controls
together (fieldsets).
A component for
displaying icons
consistently throughout your WordPress interface.
A building block for creating consistent
layouts around input fields
with standardized appearance and functionality.
A list of
all the dev notes can be reviewed from the Make Core blog
by Birgit Pauli-Haack at April 23, 2026 06:37 AM
April 22, 2026
WPTavern
#213 – Malcolm Peralty on Managed WordPress Hosting and AI Innovation at Pressable
Transcript
[00:00:19]
Nathan Wrigley:
Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case managed WordPress hosting and AI hosting innovation.
If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
So on the podcast today, we have Malcolm Peralty. Malcolm has been immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for 20 years, starting out as a full-time blogger and working his way through tech roles in project management, agencies, and even a stint in the Drupal space. These days, Malcolm is bringing his experience back to WordPress, serving as a technical account manager at Pressable, a managed WordPress hosting company.
Malcolm shares how he found his way from early forays with WordPress to managing large scale hosting environments. He talks about the lure of the Drupal world, and why he’s ultimately returned to WordPress and Pressable.
We discuss what technical account management means at Pressable, how his role differs from sales and support, focusing instead on long-term strategy for clients, performance optimization, and bridging the gap between customer needs and the underlying WP Cloud infrastructure. We hear how Pressable proactively helps clients, sometimes even advising them to downgrade their plan if optimizations mean they need fewer resources.
We go behind the scenes in Pressable, getting into how hardware considerations, plugin bloat, WooCommerce or LMS sites, and customer handholding, all come together inside one company. Malcolm gives us a candid look at performance challenges, the way hosts interact with infrastructure teams, and why education around WordPress performance is so tough, even as competing platforms prioritise speed at all costs.
We also look into the future. What are the cutting edge trends in hosting? Like database replication, virtual clusters, and especially the rise of AI within the hosting experience. Malcolm explains Pressable’s upcoming MCP, an AI powered control panel that promises to let you deploy, and manage, wordPress sites using natural language.
We explore how AI will impact everything from customer support to site deployment, potential pitfalls, and the challenge of balancing automation with human relationships.
If you’re curious about the state of managed WordPress hosting today, the interplay of tech, support, and AI, or just want to know what’s happening behind the curtain, this episode is for you.
If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
And so without further delay, I bring you Malcolm Peralty.
I am joined on the podcast by Malcolm Peralty. Hello, Malcolm.
[00:03:55]
Malcolm Peralty:
Hi there. How you doing today?
[00:03:56]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. Very nice to have you with us on the podcast today. Malcolm’s got a really interesting story. He’s done a lot, a lot of it kind of maps to things that I’ve done in my life. But it’s a tech podcast, generally we talk about WordPress, but I think we’re going to talk about hosting, AI, and possibly other CMSs.
But before we do, a moment for you, Malcolm, just to introduce yourself and give us your potted bio, I guess centering around your relationship with technology, WordPress, CMSs, that kind of thing.
[00:04:22]
Malcolm Peralty:
Yeah. So first off, I like to always say that I’m Canadian. I think that actually kind of gives us some insight into a little bit about how I think. And I live just outside of Toronto, Ontario, Canada right now, and I’ve been in the WordPress, around the WordPress space for going on 20 years.
I started with WordPress 0.72, so before the 1.0 release. And I was a full-time blogger, talking about WordPress for several years, and kind of stumbled into using some of my tech skills to work in and around technology with WordPress, and then project management. And because of project management, I’ve been able to work with agencies that build like smartphone apps and other CMS systems, and custom CMSs for customers. But I’ve always kind of kept a toe in the WordPress world as much as possible.
[00:05:11]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, and you firmly landed back in the WordPress world working for Pressable, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But you had a bit of a foray in the Drupal, Acquia world, I think. The word Acquia may not mean a great deal to people listening to this podcast, but it’s kind of the equivalent, I suppose the best mapping would be Automattic over on the Drupal side. What was your experience with Drupal? How come you’re not still fully on the Drupal side of things?
[00:05:35]
Malcolm Peralty:
Yeah, so that was kind of a strange one for me. I didn’t expect to have a position in the Drupal world. I had done some like Drupal project management before, a lot of like moving Drupal sites to WordPress or like revising a Drupal site, or adding a smartphone app to a Drupal site. But that was mostly, again, as like a project manager or a site builder, not as like someone who really understood the engineering behind Drupal.
But a long time friend of mine reached out and said, hey, would you ever be interested in a job at Acquia working at the Drupal mothership, so to speak? And the position was a technical account manager, which thankfully leans more on my skills as a project manager and someone who understands web hosting than someone who understands Drupal. So I was able to use the combination of 20 years of skills in the space to actually make a good go at it.
And I think one of the big reasons why I was so enticed and interested by the position is, honestly, Drupal jobs pay better than WordPress jobs. And it’s horrible and sad to say, but I think it was a really important factor in my determination on where my career was moving. If it wasn’t for the fact that Pressable came along when it did, and basically offered me a similar kind of pay scale, I’d probably still be in the Drupal space and who knows for how long.
[00:06:55]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I was a big Drupal user for many years but just found it was, there was a lot of things that I didn’t need that Drupal did, that WordPress could do. And so I firmly moved ship away from Drupal. Well, I think it was when Drupal finally went to version eight, so many, many years ago. Something like 2015 or something like that. And I certainly haven’t looked back.
So Pressable, you may need to go and Google that if you’re listening to this podcast. You may have heard that name before, but it is a hosting company, I guess managed hosting, dedicated hosting for WordPress websites. My understanding is they don’t do anything else. Pressable simply work with WordPress. But what’s your role over there? Let’s begin there.
[00:07:37]
Malcolm Peralty:
Yeah, so I’m a technical account manager. I’m the second technical account manager that Pressable has hired. They’re trying to build out a technical account management discipline. For those that haven’t heard the term technical account management before, you might think it’s like a sales role or something like that with a technical bent, and that’s not it at all.
We’re basically, you know, like WordPress and WordPress hosting strategists, right? So we’re thinking about like, what does your website look like a year from now, two years from now? What technologies do you need to be aware of? What end of lifes will come up that you might need to develop against? What plugins and tools are you using and how performant are they, and are there more performant options in the mix that might work for you? And so that’s really kind of the role that we take at Pressable.
Right now a lot of it is also kind of the pre-sales, right? Like which tier of service or product will your website fit into? What kind of customisations or optimisations might you want to make in moving over to the Pressable platform? And so we kind of go through all of that with customers of kind of a certain scale and size.
[00:08:36]
Nathan Wrigley:
So do you, as part of the job description then, do you monitor existing websites that are on the platform already and look for, let’s say things like bottlenecks, where something’s going wrong? The client may not be aware of it, but you can then sort of inject yourself, begin a conversation and say look, you’ve got this suite of plugins, that’s great, but we’ve noticed that improvements could be made here, there, and the other. And here’s a suggestion for something that maybe will get rid of that problem.
[00:09:02]
Malcolm Peralty:
We do get to do a little bit of that, not as much as I would like. My long-term hope would be that, much like Acquia, much WordPress VIP, TAM would be like a subscription service that customers of a certain tier would be able to sign up for, and have like that consistent access and that consistent monitoring where, like on a monthly basis, you know, we’d go through our client list and like double check all of them.
Right now we’re sometimes a point of escalation for support if need be, where they’re like, this problem’s going to take more than an hour to solve. Maybe the solutions team and the TAMs can kind of take a look at this and dive deep into it. We also kind of monitor the data coming in from our server instances. And, yeah, we’ll sometimes kind of cherry pick some of the ones that are standing out as not working as well as they should be, or using more resources than they should be, just as a point of like general optimisation, right?
It’s funny because our role helps both the customer because, again, we don’t care about the money side, right. So we’ll come in and be like, here’s the optimisations you need to make. Now you don’t need even as quite a big a plan as you have maybe. Maybe you need to downsize your plan now because we’ve helped you optimise your website.
But from a resourcing perspective on the Pressable side, it’s also advantageous because one, it makes the company look good to be proactive in that way. And two, it helps for server resources, right? We have our own cloud, WP Cloud, which is our own server stack. It’s not AWS, it’s not Google Cloud. And so optimising resources can allow us to have resources available for other people who maybe are bursting because of a big sale or front page of Reddit or something like that. So we’re always looking at those optimisations as an opportunity on both.
[00:10:37]
Nathan Wrigley:
Do you, as part of your role, get to sort of interface somewhere between the customer, the people who pay you to have hosting and the hardware side of WP Cloud? Because presumably on the WP Cloud side of things, there’s a hardware layer. There’s literally people putting boxes into racks and putting the cables in and what have you.
Because my understanding is WP Cloud is owned, well, it’s not AWS, let’s call it that. It’s not Google’s Cloud infrastructure. It’s not any of those other things. It’s managed, known by whom, you can tell us in a moment. But do you get to have a conversation, say, look, we’ve noticed that this bit of hardware isn’t as performant as maybe something else? Or, look, here’s some new thing that’s been released onto the market, can we get a dozen of those and try that out?
[00:11:17]
Malcolm Peralty:
For sure. And as Pressable continues, try to move towards the higher end of mid market to try to acquire customers that are using WooCommerce or learning management systems, we’re finding those platform opportunities where we’re providing like, here’s what we’re seeing, you know, here’s all this data that we’re collecting. Here’s what we think this means. Here’s what maybe our competitors have done, or what our customers have noticed on competitor platforms. How can we either like negate the advantages of other platforms? Or how can we find ways to make ourselves even better than them? Or, here’s what we’re already doing, great, is there any fine tuning that we can do to like eek out that extra little bit of performance?
We try not to be too prescriptive with the WP Cloud team because they really are the experts in the hardware. But we bring a lot of that WordPress knowledge to bear and say like, this is what we’re seeing from a WordPress perspective, what can you do on a hardware and software on the server perspective to kind of make this work even better?
[00:12:12]
Nathan Wrigley:
It’s a difficult juggling act to perform in a way, isn’t it? Because on the one hand, we’re always talking about how performant WordPress can be, and on the other hand, we’re always talking about plugins and themes and the fact that amassing those will slow things down. You know, you throw in an LMS or WooCommerce or something like that and suddenly the website is going to be a different animal, let’s put it that way.
And so on the one hand, trying to pitch WordPress as performant, and then on the other hand, there’s this whole bit that you are dealing with where the performance is somewhat under question. I’ve always thought that’s a difficult challenge. And certainly in terms of marketing that and making the public understand that, okay, there’s the performance on one side, but we can manage that on the other side. I think that’s a really difficult thing to do because you’re trying to communicate something incredibly technical to presumably a whole load of people, some of whom aren’t technical at all.
[00:13:03]
Malcolm Peralty:
And even worse, a lot of other competing hosts will hide a lot of issues and faults and sins that customers have made on their website through like heavily used Redis setups that like just make it seem like their website is so much faster than it actually is. Or they’ll buy hardware that is, you know, has like the fastest CPUs. And so from you as a single user testing your website, you might say, wow, my website is so fast on this other platform, but when I move it to this company, now it feels slow. But you’re not doing a test at scale. You’re doing an individual test, right?
So you go on that hardware and you put like 25, 100, 1,000 users going through a checkout process, and all of a sudden your website is slow as molasses and starts falling over. Whereas on the platform that quote, unquote, seems slower, it’s so much more resilient and able to handle that load.
So there’s so much nuance here and so many things that we’re dealing with and a lot of the job ends up being at customer education because it’s very easy in the commodity hosting space to be like, I’m going to move to this other company because they seem faster. And that really shouldn’t be your single goal. It should be understanding your website. But a lot of small business owners, medium sized business owners, even large business owners don’t really necessarily want to understand how their website is built and how their pages are built and these kinds of things.
And it’s funny you mentioned about the WordPress performance thing because sometimes I want to be like, just do this one thing for me, right? On our platform, turn off all your plugins, go back to the default theme, tell me how fast your website loads because guess what, it’s probably going to load pretty darn fast, right?
The problem I have is the customers that have 50, 60, 70 plus plugins, and two of them are different like builder tools, which is unfortunately the bane of my existence. No offence to like Elementor and Divi and Beaver Builder and all these companies that are making these tools to help people have their dream website on the internet. But man, are they ever heavy and slow when you’re trying to create a performant website these days?
And so, you know, I’m often having these conversations about, what is most important to you? And understanding as well that search engines like Google, and search engine companies believe that performance is a big deal because that’s how they manage their own infrastructure, right? If a website is slow, then they can’t really crawl it effectively and understand what’s going on with it. So that plays into a lot of the conversations that I have as well. And it’s never easy.
[00:15:23]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, I imagine it’s not. I mean, I don’t know if the goal of Pressable is to make it such that you show up with your website, pay your monthly subscription, whatever it may be, and kind of that’s it. We will take it from here. I don’t know if that’s the goal. Or if it’s more of a, we will have a conversation with you, we will make recommendations and over a period of time, we will come to some sort of happy medium where, you know, what you’ve got is what you are happy with and it’s also performant from our side.
So I don’t know how much of a conversation is there. Any website that I’ve ever brought to Pressable has been fairly straightforward. I’ve installed it, it’s worked exactly as I had anticipated, and so I’ve never really had to get into it. But, you know, a website with 10,000 SKUs, and a million visitors a day, presumably there has to be some handholding going on there.
[00:16:09]
Malcolm Peralty:
Yeah, I think the big point of delineation is the cacheability of a site, right? So the ability for us to serve it without building the pages from scratch. If you have a brochure site, if you have a marketing site, if you are, you know, the only thing on your website that’s like a real user interaction is some buttons and maybe a form to submit, like a contact form or a marketing related form, your website is going to run perfectly on Pressable without any kind of handholding, without any kind of consultation. You’re going to be able to upload it and know it’s going to be resilient to whatever traffic you receive, and even like power outages in entire halfs of countries won’t bring your website down.
If that’s the kind of experience you want, those plan tiers exist and they work great. And we have agencies that throw thousands of websites on Pressable’s platform in that kind of umbrella without any kind of issue or concern or question.
I think the consultative part comes in when you’re starting to do things like I mentioned before, learning management systems, e-commerce systems, merch drops, custom contests. If you’re doing anything that basically has a different user experience based on adding something into a cart, or like completing a module of learning that needs to be tracked and following the user, typically this means that it’s going to be uncached, which means that it’s going to rebuild that page from scratch, and that requires a fair bit of resources.
We’ve optimised a lot of things to make sure that we can do that effectively, but again, the conversation comes into play, if you add in Facebook for WooCommerce plugin that breaks cache on every page load, then we have to work with our customers to understand like what that means, and what the trade-offs are, and what replacements might exist to make it so that we can cache the majority of sessions so that they can stick within their resource utilisations that we expect them to use.
Most companies, including Pressable will sell on like the number of visits to the website, but also another piece is the amount of workers, right? So these are the little pieces of software behind the scenes that actually complete all of the things that users are requesting, right? Serving up images and web pages and shopping carts and stuff like that.
We have a really cool model where we have one worker per one VCPU, which basically means you get your own dedicated highway for that worker. He’s his own little car on his own little highway lane. Where a lot of companies will do like 40 workers to one VCPU. So imagine 40 cars on one lane highway, versus five cars on a five lane highway. So the way that we process things is a little bit different as well, and so that requires a little bit of education on our side.
[00:18:32]
Nathan Wrigley:
I think there’s this whole mysterious scientific laboratory kind of impression to hosting, if you know what I mean? I’m imagining a room, a laboratory, sort of white walls and everything, with a bunch of people wearing white overalls with pens neatly lined up in their top pocket, and obsessing about these acronyms. Well, this isn’t an acronym, but you mentioned workers.
But you’ve got things like Redis, you’ve got things like edge caching and all of this kind of stuff. And honestly, to me, a lot of that is a bit of a puzzle. And I don’t know how you educate the public about those things other than just saying, just don’t worry about it. We’re here for you. We’ll deal with that complexity.
But also, I’m curious to know what kind of innovations are there still to be done? Now obviously we’re sort of crystal ball gazing a little bit here, but I am curious about where is the bleeding edge of server technology and hosting technology? What are the things which are just a little bit over the horizon, but are of interest, which may drop in the next year, two years, three years, something like that?
[00:19:34]
Malcolm Peralty:
Yeah, I would say we’re seeing a lot of web assembly type efforts, which is kind of interesting, which is, yeah, I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen, there’s a WordPress Playground site where you can have like WordPress basically running in a browser. You don’t have to install it anywhere. It just exists in your browser as like this ephemeral install of WordPress that you can play with and do stuff with, and then export to a real install of WordPress if you’re interested.
I think that is a super impactful and interesting technology, and we’ll see probably more of that in the next little while, and how hosts can kind of play into that. I think that we’ll also see better caching technology, better database technology, but also I think better replication technology. So everyone knows that a lot of WordPress kind of exists within the database, and so if you want to have high availability, you need to be able to have that database exist in multiple places. But if you’re doing transactions on your like primary database for like e-commerce, you’re like buying products and you have, Malcolm bought a t-shirt from my website, he wants this size and he wants it shipped here, we need to now replicate that to any other like high availability databases that we have. That replication right now is very old technology in a lot of ways, and it’s not as optimised as we would like it to be. So there’s a latency that exists there in replicating that to other places.
Acquia and some of the other companies I worked for, that latency could be really high or really low depending on how it was configured, right? How long do we kind of keep that data there before we send it over?
We try to do as much real-time streaming at Pressable as possible to make it so like, you know, within like two seconds, the data is now in that replication. And so if your primary goes down, you’ve lost maybe a second or two seconds of data. On some websites, even that can be really bad, right? Because if you, let’s say you’re doing a big product drop and you have 10,000 people wanting to buy tickets to your concert, and you lose two seconds of data, that could be hundreds of transactions that just evaporate into the ether. So better ways of syncing that data across, and managing that relationship between multiple servers I think is going to be a big transition that we see in the marketplace.
We’re already seeing the idea of virtual clusters. So multiple data centres pretending to be like one local server. So then we don’t have that same feel of migrating or syncing data between locations, it just pretends it’s all kind of in the same place. So I think that will be kind of interesting to see because again, that adds more resiliency. And I think, everyone that I’ve ever talked to, if you say like, how long are you okay with your website being down? Even if it’s not a moneymaking website, you’ll hear them say something like, I don’t know, maybe an hour at most, right? So finding ways to make websites more resilient is going to be important.
And then I think just a better understanding just from top to bottom on what’s happening with a website, right? So we have a lot of logging, but it’s not necessarily the best at auditing. So, for example, if Nathan came on my website and got access to it and deleted a plugin, I might not have the best tools right now to be able to say, oh, it was this IP address at this time, he logged into this user, he did this action, and have that complete picture to be able to kind of quickly and easily reverse.
We kind of depend on backups right now a lot of the time, and I hate that. Or we depend on like trying to fish through logs and make those connections using our human brains. All of that is just a really poor solution and I think AI will hopefully help with some of that, and I’m looking forward to having more of this like very specific picture of every action that has on a website without, again, adding a whole bunch of load to the server environment or a whole bunch of data storage requirements that makes it really impossible for organisations to kind of have all this information, right?
Because if I start auditing every action that I’m taking on a website that I have access to, and you think of Pressable having multiple thousands of websites, hosting platforms, you can imagine the amount of data we’d then need to record, right? So data compression becomes super important, or the ability to kind of infer things based on data that we’re seeing becomes important. The amount of work that I do in like looking through logs would make your eyes kind of pop out of your head. It’s brutal sometimes. And logs have never been very user friendly.
So again, another area that AI has been helping us with is like, okay, pull out the things that are potentially the most impactful, the most interesting, the things that stand out over like a statistics, probability kind of system.
[00:23:48]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, I think what’s really curious about everything that you’ve just said is, so there’s this kind of impression for people who are just casual users of WordPress that you go to a hosting company, it’s a bunch of files and it’s a database, how hard can it be?
And then you’ve just given us a bit of a window into, well, this is how hard it can be, because there’s so many scenarios. And the typical mom and pop store where, like you said, an hour’s downtime might not be the end of the world, and most of the things can be cash and all that kind of thing. Well, that stands in real contrast to the, I don’t know, the gigantic megacorp .com company that’s doing 8,000 transactions every couple of minutes and there’s millions of dollars going through. And there’s just a whole other layer of things going on there.
And so you see the word Pressable and you think, hosting company, pretty straightforward. And I think it’s really interesting that you get an opportunity to come on and say, well, actually, no, there’s this other layer. There’s all this stuff going on in the background. There’s all of this technology. We’re thinking about the future. You know, we’ve got different geographical locations where things are housed, and we’re trying to speed that up so that there are all these different clusters. It sounds complicated, essentially. I’ll boil it down to that.
So I am a Pressable customer and when I go into the Pressable admin, I sort of log in and, you know, I’m presented with the usual array of different options. I would say that there’s more than probably somebody like me is requiring, but there it is anyway. You know, there’s lots of different options for tweaking this, that, and the other thing.
What I’m trying to sort of draw an analogy to is that it can be a little bit overwhelming if your day job isn’t to deal with a website. You log in and, what is this? What does this menu even exist? There’s probably ways of Googling it and finding it out. But I know that in the near future, Pressable is going to be launching sort of like an AI component to the hosting side of things. An MCP, you’ve described it as Pressable’s MCP. And then in parentheses, get AI to do things related to your hosting, whether that’s WooCommerce or WordPress or performance optimisation or whatever it would be.
So this is interesting. And I’m just curious as to how deep are you going to allow the AI to go? We all know that the AI, any AI can hallucinate. So I’m curious as to know what kind of things are you unleashing for the AI? Is it just a case of, okay, I would like the light theme now, please? Or does it penetrate much deeper than that?
[00:26:10]
Malcolm Peralty:
So it’ll be in phases over the next little while, we’ll unveil these features and what connections that we have. But eventually the expectation is, anything that you could do or click on as a user in the control panel, an AI could also act on and do as well. So a great example that we’ve been giving our agency partners is if you, let’s say, are working on code for a customer’s website, you could say to the AI built into your Visual Studio Code or your GitHub or whatever, hey, spin up another sandbox site, push this code, update the database, pull from production, all the files, and let me know when this is complete.
And the MCP will go and it will spin up a new sandbox site, a new WordPress install, with a new domain name attached to it. It will grab your code and push it up to that website. It’ll go to production and grab the files from the wp-content uploads folder, and sync it over to this new staging site or sandbox site that you’ve asked for. And then it’ll say, hey, by the way, it’s now ready for testing.
And you’ve done this all with natural language as a command behind the scenes. Or, let’s say you’re running a thousand sites, tell me all the websites that need like a Gravity Forms plugin update. And it will go and it’ll check all of your websites in the Pressable platform and give you a list of like, hey, here are the ones with Gravity Forms updates. And you could say, okay, update them for me please. And it’ll go back and it’ll do that job.
[00:27:24]
Nathan Wrigley:
So I guess the goal is to make it straightforward to use natural language to do a variety of tasks. Now obviously there’s got to be some serious guardrails around this because, you know, it would be very easy to inadvertently type, delete all of my, that’s a bad example but you get point. You know, what are the contraints?
[00:27:43]
Malcolm Peralty:
Yeah, please don’t use dangerously skip permissions, for example. So a lot of the AI tools that already exist have some human in the loop questioning. Are you sure you want me to do this? Are you sure you want me to do this kind of thing? And kind of seek their approval. We’re also talking about what, if anything, we’re really going to do on our side about that? We have pretty solid backup solutions put in place. So maybe if you, you know, accidentally said, clear out all of my platform, and it deleted all of your websites, you could then hopefully say, can you actually restore from backups all of those sites and have it restore from backups all of those sites.
So, you know, we keep hourly backups of database, daily of the WordPress file system, so there is that. Also our main WordPress install is simlinked, which means that you can’t actually change any of the core files. So even if you told it to delete WordPress, it can’t actually do that piece of it. So your WordPress install would still exist, but all your plugins and uploads and database would all be gone. But you could just restore them again using natural language.
So there are some guide rails that we can put in, but at the end of the day like, you’ll be able to connect whatever AI tool you’re using. Maybe you have Ollama with a local AI tool on your computer. Maybe you’re using Claude or Codex or something else. You’ll be able to use any of those AI tools. And so some of it is really on the person using it to put in some of those guardrails and those human and loop things. And I would recommend having a like system prompt that basically says like, before you do anything destructive, check with me first. Not that it won’t automatically do some of that, but it’s just good to have a secondary layer.
[00:29:13]
Nathan Wrigley:
And how are you exposing these capabilities to, let’s say Claude or whatever it may be? So what does that interaction look like? How is it that certain capabilities are available, but others are maybe not, and so on.
[00:29:25]
Malcolm Peralty:
Yeah, I mean I like to think of an MCP kind of like USB/API for AI. So we’re basically just making those kind of endpoints available to the MCP, or making like those API endpoints available to AI, so that it can undertake things on your behalf. So like our whole control panel is basically APIs all the way down, so to speak. So it’s not very hard to kind of hook those things up.
I think the harder part is making sure that the AI understands what these controls, what these APIs do, what they expect to receive, what they expect to give back, and what that all means. And once all of those kind of definitions are in place, then it’s pretty easy.
[00:30:05]
Nathan Wrigley:
I think one of the curious things for me is being inside, let’s say the Pressable UI where I’m navigating with a mouse and I’m clicking on things, everything is very intentional. You know, I go to a thing, and I do a thing, and I get a prompt to say, are you sure you want to do this thing? And I say, yes. And so it goes. And so every single thing that I do requires an interaction with me.
I suppose, with an AI, you could concatenate a variety of things. Maybe the AI has some sort of misunderstanding along the way, or you type things in such a way that it’s not entirely clear. And then kind of unpicking, okay, what just happened? It’s really easy to unpick that in the UI because you can say to the support rep, well, I did this, and then the site died. Okay, we know what happened there.
Whereas with this cascade of things, which is done with natural language, presumably this is where your logging, that you described earlier, comes in. There isn’t really a question there, but I’m curious as to what that process is. The capacity for many dominoes to fall from just one simple prompt, I suppose as a point of concern for you guys, because you are going to have to be unpicking all of this on the backend when things, which they inevitably will, go wrong.
[00:31:16]
Malcolm Peralty:
For sure. And I mean this is one of those areas though where we’re ahead of the curve. I think a lot of companies will be adding these kinds of things. But from an AI perspective, I mean, since October or November of last year, we’ve seen the skills and abilities and understanding of the top tier AI tools just jump exponentially. So the number of mistakes or concerns that we have have gone down in that same vein.
Our support team has also been trained up in a lot of these. And we’ve been testing a lot of these MCP pieces for a long time now. So we feel pretty confident that those that enable this and that have a good understanding of what this means and how to use it won’t make too many mistakes or have too many concerns or issues.
You know, again, we’re targeting a lot of our agency partners that are developers that already kind of live and breathe this stuff. So they’re also used to being able to untangle and knot if they tie themselves in one. So I don’t expect someone with their like first WordPress website on Pressable to enable MCP and start using it.
I really think this is most valuable to agencies or companies at scale. You know, if you’re running one website, you probably don’t need this, but if you’re running like 10, 100, 1,000 websites, then this tooling becomes very helpful. Because you can have like a, maybe do it on one site and now then replicate that same thing you just did across all of the sites I manage.
[00:32:33]
Nathan Wrigley:
I don’t really know how to phrase this question, but I’ll give this a go. At the moment, presumably you have a fairly solid relationship with your customers. You know, if something goes wrong, you log in, you enable the chat widget, you have that conversation. There’s this backwards and forwards, okay, great. And maybe there’s lots of clients that you get that you never have that interaction with.
But I’m just curious how that relationship over time might change with the advent of AI. And what I mean by that is, it’s almost like you’re not talking to humans anymore. And because of that, you start to have a different impression of the company that you are dealing with. Okay, it’s just some sort of AI entity, I don’t need to worry about it so much. Maybe loyalty starts to come into question because there’s no humans there anyway.
So again, it’s very hard to encapsulate what I’m saying, but presumably from a marketing point of view, there has to be some moment at which you say, okay, there’s too much AI now. We’re no longer a bunch of humans presenting ourselves to the world. We just look like a bunch of robots. Do you know what I’m saying there? Does any of that land?
[00:33:34]
Malcolm Peralty:
It does. I will say, we have those conversations internally. The expectation is always going to be like, when we add a new feature, it’s going to be added for humans first and then added to our AI tooling. But the only way that you can compete in the modern marketplace is to take advantage of some of the tools and opportunities we’ve been given with AI. As difficult as it is, there’s probably a business case, you know, I’m sure there will be businesses that will target people saying like, we don’t use AI for support, we don’t have AI integrations, we’re a completely human business. But I think the difficulty will be like scaling and competing in the modern marketplace.
And like a lot of the agencies we’re talking to are expecting this. They’re pushing us towards this because they’re looking to reduce their time to delivery, right? They want to be able to sit in a coffee shop with a customer, get a brief of the business, give that brief to, you know, an AI tool that transcribes their voice to words, and then have it go through this whole system of setting up a hosting sandbox for the website, set up WordPress, select a theme that matches their expectations, set up the brand colours, and almost have like a proof of concept at the end of a meal with a customer, that was assisted by AI.
And if they can’t do that first step of setting up a sandbox or a staging site for the customer, then we’re not part of that conversation at all. They’re going to go where there is that feature and that functionality, and Pressable won’t be part of that conversation at all.
And as end users, I mean, having AI assist with the things that agencies or higher touchpoint customers need, gives us that flexibility now to be available for the $25 a month customers who actually need the handholding and support from a human that we just couldn’t do otherwise, right? It just doesn’t scale properly at that price point.
So I think this could be advantageous to both sides if it’s used right and done right. But I definitely agree, there’s landmines that we have to kind of be cautious of and avoid, and we have to be very careful about how we apply this. And I think the key thing is always making sure that everything that we do is human first, and then AI enhanced, rather than AI first and human supplemented. It’s just a hard line to walk.
[00:35:37]
Nathan Wrigley:
It’s so interesting that conversation you’ve just described in the cafe where, by the end of the cup of coffee, you’ve got yourself a website based upon a conversation you were having moments before. The collapse of the timeline there. You know, we used to think that this five minute install was a big thing. Now it’s like the five minute website that’s fully ready to go, you know, or at least some simulation of a website. May not be the finished one but, you know, you’ve got a staging site ready, with a theme that’s adjacent to what you want to do, with some content that might replicate what you want to do. And it all took place in less time than it took you to finish a single coffee. And that’s so interesting. And you have to armour yourself against that.
That raises another question of course, which is how far you, your tentacles go into the website itself. Because traditionally hosting companies really didn’t concern themselves with the website, apart from the fact that the website was available and, you know, we can see what your plugins are and yada, yada. But it does sound like we’re straying into theming, and possible content creation and things like that. So I don’t know if that falls into the roadmap a bit as well.
So maybe there’s a future where you can, with the AI sort of say, I’d like to swap out my theme. It’s Christmas time, give me a Christmas theme. But we’re doing that in the hosting environment. We’re not necessarily having to log into the website. Again, do you sort of see where I’m going with that?
[00:37:03]
Malcolm Peralty:
Yeah, and I foresee for sure, but the integrations with AI that WordPress 7.0 already has, and the discussions for 7.1 make me believe that Pressable’s MCP will be able to talk to WordPress’s AI integration and do that from end to end. So, I mean we could already do it with the MCP, like adjusting database values and stuff like that, but that’s not what I would consider an ideal way of doing this.
But like I said, with the changes that are happening in WordPress Core, I definitely foresee like a complete end-to-end solution. You know, one AI talking to another, who then carries that task forward, reports back to the Pressable MCP and lets us know that theme change is done, those plugin updates are done, the content change is done. And again, all from that initial prompt, you know, maybe in your Visual Studio Code, which is just crazy to me.
[00:37:45]
Nathan Wrigley:
I am so used to basically not going back to the hosting until there’s a problem. You know, I go to the login URL for the website in question, I log in, I move around the WordPress UI, create a post, publish a post, schedule something, whatever, upload some assets. You get the idea.
And the idea of that not being the modus operandi for everybody will be so interesting, because it’s going to shatter that experience of, you know, you could watch a YouTube video to figure out the thing because everybody does the thing in the same way.
But it feels like we’re heralding a future where no two people are going to have the exact same experience. You know, you may be creating content through a text editor, which then somehow gets uploaded, or the text editor merely creates a prompt, and then the theme is swapped or amended because you’ve typed in some prompt.
So, you know, my UI, my IDE, my text editor, my version of WordPress, maybe I might build my site entirely differently to you. So that’s fascinating and slightly worrying at the same time because, how do you support that? Not just Pressable, but how does the community support it when we’ve got an infinite number of ways to create a blog post?
[00:38:55]
Malcolm Peralty:
And not just a blog post, but everything.
[00:38:57]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, right, everything. Yep.
[00:38:58]
Malcolm Peralty:
Maybe you say you want this Christmas theme. Maybe it doesn’t select a theme and change the colours, maybe it writes a whole new CSS for the theme you have. Or maybe it writes a whole new theme, or maybe it writes a plugin that automatically switches it around Christmas time. Like it doesn’t have to pull off the shelf from the theme marketplace or the plugin marketplace that already exists. It can create something wholly new and specific for you.
Maybe it writes a whole new block for you, rather than trying to pull together three or four blocks to be able to create the output that you’re looking for. And some of these things for sure are not going to necessarily be super performant or super secure, especially initially, right? Maybe a year or two from now, once the AI is even smarter than it is today, or has a better understanding of WordPress than it does today. Maybe it will kind of think more about security and performance than it does right now. But you’re going to have these people deploying things that are not the ideal outcome, or ideal solution, or ideal anything. It’s just works for them right now.
And it’s funny, I always hear people talk about maintenance, right? How are we going to maintain all this AI code? We, humans are not going to maintain all this AI code. AI is going to maintain and update all this AI code. And so the joke of it is, if you come along and your host comes back to you and says, hey, your website’s running like a dog. You’re not going to spend half a day or a day trying to troubleshoot anymore. You’re just going to say, hey, AI, why is my website running poorly? Fix it or give me a list of things that need to be fixed, or what have you.
I at Pressable am already like using AI to basically write scripts that run through like two dozen WP-CLI commands, another two dozen like database commands, and some like full code searches. Give me a quick report on anything that needs to be optimised, right? So I didn’t write that script from scratch, I didn’t write that code from scratch to do that. I directed an AI to be able to create that for me. And now as the human in loop, I’m interpreting the data that it’s collected, but I can foresee a future very near where I say, hey, AI now interpret all this data you’ve collected and send a summary to the customer on what they need to change or do. Go and act on my behalf and make these changes.
[00:40:49]
Nathan Wrigley:
That’s so interesting. So there’s a couple of things. The first one is that it feels almost like we’re heralding in a future in which the WordPress UI maybe is not seen by everybody. So a good example would be, I have a Mac. I rarely use the Mac. I use things on the Mac. You know, I’m using a browser. I use a text editor. I use the application that we’re using to record. I’m not really using the Mac. I hope that lands, if you understand what I mean. I switch it on, but the Mac kind of just goes into the background and I use a bunch of things, which, they’re on the screen because I’ve got a Mac.
[00:41:25]
Malcolm Peralty:
And I would say like 90% of it’s probably a browser at this point, right?
[00:41:28]
Nathan Wrigley:
Right, right.
[00:41:30]
Malcolm Peralty:
It’s a website that you go to. You can do Slack in a browser. You can do what we’re doing today in a browser. Pretty much most things that I do live in a browser. There’s very few applications that I actually need to load on my machine day to day because everything can exist in a browser. I think that paradigm will just be for the next generation, or for the transition that’s happening now, the new paradigm will be everything just lives in an AI application. Whether it’s installing your computer or whether it’s also in a browser. It’ll just be AI.
[00:41:54]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, so it is analogous to that. It’s just this idea that the WordPress UI, that’s the only method that anybody has had, maybe that will be something that a bunch of people use, but it won’t be familiar to everybody because there’s no need for it.
And the other thing that you mentioned is, I suppose I would use any of the stuff that you’ve described, but there’s the one caveat. And the one caveat is I have to know that I can walk it back. I have to know that there is a way for me to undo every mistake that I just made because I got carried away. I sat down, got a bit carried away on a Saturday afternoon, made a bunch of tweaks. I really regret it. I want to know that I can go back and unpick that stuff and for it to be a seamless unpicking. So backups, I guess is the most straightforward way of doing that.
[00:42:40]
Malcolm Peralty:
And audit logs, right? So like one of the things that I’ve done is, in my system instructions, I do put, before you do anything else, backup the file system, backup the database and create a, like a markdown file that’s going to be step by step, everything that was done, everything that you thought so that I can then review it. And that really helps me kind of get an understanding of the tasks it took and maybe why it took them, to help me refine future attempts, right?
So going back to what we’re doing in hosting, like we’re always trying to think through, like you mentioned, everything is very specific and clickable, and we want to make sure that the AI understands exactly kind of what to click on, or what to select. And having that auditing is super important for that.
[00:43:19]
Nathan Wrigley:
And that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s a human readable or parsable log of everything. Something where, you know, you’ve got millions of data points in the audit log, but I can actually drill down into that in a meaningful way. Because it may be that I only want to undo a portion of what I did. I’m happy with some things, but I would like to go back. An audit log, as you’ve said, it’s fairly mind numbing stuff.
But we are going to be producing so many more amendments if all we have to do is speak because you can easily, you know, imagine it. I want the Christmas theme. No, not that one. Try something else. No, there’s too much red in that. Swap the red for the blue. And Father Christmas, I’d like him on the homepage but, no, a different one. In 12 seconds we’ve got thousands and thousands of things that have happened.
[00:44:06]
Malcolm Peralty:
I will say though, how much of that do you remember doing manually, right? Like I’ve gotten to the end of that kind of thought process and gone, wait, there was like a theme like two or three themes ago that actually was, a little bit of customisation could have been cool. What was that theme?
Even as a human, I’ve had lapses in memory when I’m quickly producing outcomes where I can’t necessarily roll it back so easily. So at least with an audit log, you’ll have a much better understanding of what was done and when. Human memory is also failable.
[00:44:30]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, and I guess it’ll be interesting to see how much of that burden companies like Pressable take on. Like, you mentioned backups, maybe it will become de rigueur for you every few seconds whilst there’s interactions with MCPs. Look, we’re just going to go belt and braces. Every time you do something, which we detect is fairly sizable, we’re just going to take a backup, even though you never asked us to just in case. You know, those kind of things.
And have a UI to surface information so that the audit log is readable and those kind of things. And that’s all ahead of you. So it doesn’t exist moment, but it’ll certainly be things that will need to be tooled and invented in the future, I would’ve imagined.
[00:45:10]
Malcolm Peralty:
I mean, one of the hard parts, this might be transitioning the conversation a little bit, one of the hard parts is, you mentioned that AI is creating all these artefacts, and now all these potential backups. AI is already like indexing all of these websites and creating a lot of web traffic, and a lot of load on servers, for example. We had a recent instance where an AI bot went to a website and kept on adding different products to the cart and removing them. Well, every time it added a product to a cart was now an uncachable session.
And it did this millions of times over the course of a day. So we were like, okay, we got to block this bot. This is crazy. So we blocked the bot and about like 10 minutes later we start seeing the exact same traffic pattern from a completely different IP address with a completely different user agent. The bot had figured out an end way around our block and was now doing that same task again to try to, I don’t know, understand this website better, right?
The problem is, as an industry, we don’t know how to pass these costs on to customers because they think it’s kind of unfair in a way, right? Like, why should I have to pay for additional storage for all these audit logs and all these backups? For more bandwidth for my website or more resources for my website, to host or send all of my pages to these different AI bots? And it all kind of comes on us where we either have to like comp all of this technical effort that’s existing, or we have to convince clients to be okay with paying for it. And that has been a really interesting change in the dynamic with a hosting partner.
[00:46:24]
Nathan Wrigley:
That is so interesting. All those hidden costs, all those hidden things going on. Maybe there needs to be a luddite toggle in the UI somewhere where you just disable all of it. I want the WordPress UI, I want to do things manually. This is my preferred way of doing things.
[00:46:38]
Malcolm Peralty:
Block ChatGPT. Block Claude. I don’t want any of them viewing my website. Forget them.
[00:46:42]
Nathan Wrigley:
But it will be curious to see if there’s a subset of people who are, as you’ve described, unwilling to pay for that stuff because it’s simply something that they don’t use. They have no anticipation of using. It will be interesting to see if there’s a subset of people.
And also how clever these technologies become to disrupt things like that. You know, malicious actors out there who managed to come up with a million different ways to circuit around the blocks that you put on. And it will be interesting to see if just the cost of being online does rise with the advent of AI.
I mean, certainly the storage of all of these things is certainly going to rise. The conversations with the AI is certainly adding a financial cost. You know, there’s lots of hardware being built at the moment and there’s a cost to that. Certainly isn’t cheap. But whether or not we can cope with that, and whether or not your price points can keep up with that, and whether customers are going to pay for it.
Okay, there we go. That is so interesting. There’s so much stuff to dive into there. We could probably talk for another hour or so, but there we go. So, Malcolm, if anybody wants to reach out to you or learn more about Pressable, I guess, where would we reach out to you? Do you do social media or whatever it may be?
[00:47:51]
Malcolm Peralty:
I try not to. For Pressable, it’s pressable.com. For myself, I’d prefer you go through my personal website, which is my last name, .com. So peralty.com. And if you do want to get me on social media, honestly, really the only one I’m ever on is LinkedIn and I only kind of connect with people that I actually connect with. And then Twitter or X or whatever it’s called, I passively view from time to time. But honestly, the best other places would be, you know, you could probably find me on one of the WordPress Slack communities, for example, if you’re really interested.
[00:48:18]
Nathan Wrigley:
Okay, so Peralty, peralty.com. If you are driving a car listening to this and you can’t write it down, then go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Malcolm Peralty in it, we will have all of the links that were suggested and talked about during this episode right on the episode show notes. So, Malcolm, thank you so much for chatting to me today and peeling back the curtain a little bit on the hosting over at Pressable. Thank you.
[00:48:42]
Malcolm Peralty:
I appreciate it. Appreciate it so much. Thank you for having me.
On the podcast today we have
Malcolm Peralty
Malcolm has been immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for nearly 20 years, starting out as a full-time blogger and working his way through tech roles in project management, agencies, and even a stint in the Drupal space. These days, Malcolm is bringing his experience back to WordPress, serving as a technical account manager at Pressable, a managed WordPress hosting company.
Malcolm shares how he found his way from early forays with WordPress to managing large-scale hosting environments. He talks about the lure of the Drupal world, and why he ultimately returned to WordPress and Pressable.
We discuss what technical account management means at Pressable, how his role differs from sales and support, focusing instead on long-term strategy for clients, performance optimisation, and bridging the gap between customer needs, and the underlying WP Cloud infrastructure. We hear how Pressable proactively helps clients, sometimes even advising them to downgrade their plans if optimisations mean they need fewer resources.
We go behind the scenes in Pressable, getting into how hardware considerations, plugin bloat, WooCommerce or LMS sites, and customer hand-holding all come together inside one company. Malcolm gives us a candid look at performance challenges, the ways hosts interact with infrastructure teams, and why education around WordPress performance is so tough, even as competing platforms prioritise speed at all costs.
We also look to the future. What are the cutting-edge trends in hosting, like database replication, virtual clusters, and especially the rise of AI within the hosting experience. Malcolm explains Pressable’s upcoming MCP, an AI-powered control panel that promises to let you deploy and manage WordPress sites using natural language. We explore how AI will impact everything from customer support to site deployment, potential pitfalls, and the challenge of balancing automation with human relationships.
If you’re curious about the state of managed WordPress hosting today, the interplay of tech, support, and AI, or just want to know what’s happening behind the curtain, this episode is for you.
Useful links
Pressable
Drupal
Acquia
WP Cloud
peralty.com
by Nathan Wrigley at April 22, 2026 02:00 PM
HeroPress
😊 From a Small Village to WordCamp Asia: My WordPress Journey 🌍✨
આ નિબંધ ગુજરાતીમાં પણ ઉપલબ્ધ છે
वर्डप्रेसने मुझे मेरे ज़िंदगी में कुछ अलग करने का मौक़ा दिया।
Hear Shital read her essay in her own voice!
From Curiosity to Contribution — How WordPress Helped Me Build a Career, Confidence, and Global Opportunities
Introduction
Every journey begins with a small step, often driven by curiosity rather than clarity. My journey into technology was not planned. It started with a simple question:
What should I learn?
Coming from a small village with limited exposure to computers, I never imagined that one day I would be part of a global community and attend an international event like WordCamp Asia
My path was not traditional. I did not come from a technical background, nor did I have a clear roadmap. But what I did have was curiosity, determination, and the willingness to learn
Over time, that curiosity turned into skills, those skills turned into a career, and that career connected me to a global community through WordPress
This is the story of how WordPress became the source of my satisfaction and joy
Early Life and Education
I come from a small village, where opportunities in technology were limited. For higher education, I moved to the city of Rajkot
Like many students, I followed a traditional academic path and completed my Bachelor of Science in Chemistry.
However, after completing my degree, I felt uncertain about my future
. Chemistry was my subject, but it was not my passion.
That is when I decided to learn computers
Starting My Computer Journey
In 2009, I enrolled in a Computer Engineering course. Everything was new to me—programming, logic, and technical concepts.
It was not easy, especially coming from a non-technical background. But I was determined to learn
I joined a 3-month training program but completed only 1.5 months. At that point, I had a choice:
Wait… or take a risk.
I chose to take a risk
I applied for a job—and I was selected as a PHP Web Developer
That moment changed my life.
Building a Career in PHP
For the next five years, I worked as a Core PHP Developer.
Then one day, everything changed.
My boss said:
“Add content to the WordPress post sidebar.”
I was shocked
I didn’t know WordPress.
But I didn’t give up.
I searched, learned, and completed the task
That one moment changed my direction forever.
Discovering WordPress
As I explored WordPress, I realized its true power.
With less code, we could build faster, better, and smarter websites
In 2015, I decided to focus fully on WordPress.
And that decision changed my life.
Choosing Independence
In 2018, I took another big step—I left my job.
I started working remotely as a WordPress Developer
It was risky… but it gave me freedom
Freedom to work globally.
Freedom to grow.
Freedom to dream bigger.
Becoming a Contributor
I developed and published two plugins in the WordPress repository—
Contact Information Widget
and
Shital Quiz Cloner for LearnDash
Seeing people use my work gave me deep satisfaction
I started contributing to Core, Meta, and Polyglots.
I became a
Core and Meta Contributor in WordPress
I have contributed to multiple WordPress releases, including:
4.9 “Tipton”
4.9.5 Security and Maintenance Release
5.0 “Bebo”
5.1 “Betty”
5.2 “Jaco”
5.3 “Kirk”
5.4 “Adderley”
5.5 “Eckstine”
5.6 “Simone”
5.7 “Esperanza”
5.8 “Tatum”
5.9 “Josephine”
6.0 “Arturo”
6.6 “Dorsey”
I was also honored to be part of the
Women Squad for WordPress 5.6 Release Planning
Seeing my name
“Shital Marakana”
in Design, Tech, and Lead was an unforgettable moment
WordCamp Experiences in India
My first WordCamp in Mumbai was an amazing experience
I realized something important:
WordPress is not just about code…
It is about people
I attended WordCamps in Mumbai, Nagpur, and Ahmedabad.
Each one helped me grow.
The Dream of WordCamp Asia
WordCamp Asia was my dream
But financially, it was difficult.
So I watched live streams
I learned online
I stayed inspired
And I waited…
Dream Became Reality
Finally, my dream came true
I was selected as a
volunteer at WordCamp Asia
I also received the
Zeel Thakkar Scholarship
The most special part?
I attended with my family
My husband supported me.
My 4-year-old son,
Mantra
, enjoyed every moment
This was not just my journey—it became our journey.
Volunteering at WordCamp Asia
Volunteering was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life
I worked with people from around the world
At the end, I received my volunteer certificate
It was not just a certificate.
It was a symbol of my journey.
What WordCamp Asia Gave Me
Did it give me financial freedom?
Not immediately.
Did it give me community?
Yes
Did it give me global exposure?
Absolutely
But most importantly—
It gave me direction.
Conclusion
When I look back at my journey, it feels like a story of courage, belief, and growth
WordPress started as curiosity…
But it became my identity.
From a small village to a global stage
this journey changed me.
There were doubts.
There were fears.
But I kept going
And WordCamp Asia became my turning point.
It didn’t just give me results—
it gave me direction.
It didn’t just give me success—
it gave me possibility.
It didn’t just change my present—
it shaped my future.
WordPress gave me confidence.
It gave me a voice.
It gave me a community
And today, I know—
It is not just what I do—it is who I have become, and who I am still becoming.
એક નાના ગામથી વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયા સુધી: મારી વર્ડપ્રેસ સફર
શીતલને તેના પોતાના અવાજમાં તેનો નિબંધ વાંચતા સાંભળો!
જિજ્ઞાસાથી કોન્ટ્રીબ્યુશન સુધી — વર્ડપ્રેસે કેવી રીતે મને કારકિર્દી, આત્મવિશ્વાસ અને વૈશ્વિક તકો આપી
પરિચય
દરેક સફર એક નાના પગલાથી શરૂ થાય છે,
ઘણીવાર સ્પષ્ટતા કરતાં જિજ્ઞાસાથી પ્રેરિત થાય છે.
મારી ટેક્નોલોજીની સફર પણ એવી જ હતી — કોઈ પ્લાન નહોતો, માત્ર એક સવાલ હતો:
મારે શું શીખવું જોઈએ?
એક નાના ગામમાંથી આવું છું જ્યાં કોમ્પ્યુટરનો ઉપયોગ ખૂબ જ ઓછો થાય છે, મેં ક્યારેય કલ્પના પણ નહોતી કરી કે એક દિવસ હું વૈશ્વિક સમુદાયનો ભાગ બનીશ અને વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયા જેવા આંતરરાષ્ટ્રીય કાર્યક્રમમાં હાજરી આપીશ.
મારો માર્ગ પરંપરાગત નહોતો. હું ટેકનિકલ બેકગ્રાઉન્ડમાંથી આવી ન હતી, કે મારી પાસે સ્પષ્ટ રોડમેપ નહોતો. પરંતુ મારી પાસે જે હતું તે જિજ્ઞાસા, નિશ્ચય અને શીખવાની ઇચ્છા હતી.
સમય જતાં, આ જિજ્ઞાસા ધીમે ધીમે કૌશલ્ય બની, કૌશલ્ય કારકિર્દી બની, અને કારકિર્દી મને વર્ડપ્રેસ સમુદાય સાથે જોડતી ગઈ
આ વાર્તા છે કે કેવી રીતે વર્ડપ્રેસ મારા સંતોષ અને આનંદનો સ્ત્રોત બન્યો.
પ્રારંભિક જીવન અને શિક્ષણ
હું એક નાના ગામડામાંથી આવું છું, જ્યાં ટેકનોલોજીમાં તકો મર્યાદિત હતી. ઉચ્ચ શિક્ષણ માટે, હું રાજકોટ શહેરમાં રહેવા ગઈ.
ઘણા વિદ્યાર્થીઓની જેમ, મેં પણ પરંપરાગત શૈક્ષણિક માર્ગ અપનાવ્યો અને રસાયણશાસ્ત્રમાં વિજ્ઞાનની સ્નાતક ડિગ્રી પૂર્ણ કરી.
જોકે, મારી ડિગ્રી પૂર્ણ કર્યા પછી, મને મારા ભવિષ્ય વિશે અનિશ્ચિતતા અનુભવાઈ.
રસાયણશાસ્ત્ર મારો વિષય હતો, પણ તે મારો શોખ નહોતો.
ત્યારે જ મેં કોમ્પ્યુટર શીખવાનું નક્કી કર્યું
કમ્પ્યુટર સફરની શરૂઆત
૨૦૦૯ માં, મેં કમ્પ્યુટર એન્જિનિયરિંગના કોર્ષમાં પ્રવેશ મેળવ્યો. મારા માટે બધું જ નવું હતું – પ્રોગ્રામિંગ, લોજિક અને ટેકનિકલ ખ્યાલો.
તે સરળ નહોતું, ખાસ કરીને નોન-ટેકનિકલ પૃષ્ઠભૂમિમાંથી. પરંતુ હું શીખવા માટે મક્કમ હતી.
હું ૩ મહિનાના તાલીમ કાર્યક્રમમાં જોડાઈ  પણ માત્ર ૧.૫ મહિનામાં  જ પૂર્ણ કરી લીધું. તે સમયે, મારી પાસે એક વિકલ્પ હતો:
રાહ જોવી… કે રિસ્ક લેવુ?
મેં રિસ્ક લેવાનું પસંદ કર્યું.
મેં નોકરી માટે અરજી કરી – અને મારી PHP વેબ ડેવલપર તરીકે પસંદગી થઈ.
તે ક્ષણે મારું જીવન બદલી નાખ્યું.
PHP માં કારકિર્દી બનાવવી
આગામી પાંચ વર્ષ સુધી, મેં કોર PHP ડેવલપર તરીકે કામ કર્યું.
પછી એક દિવસ, બધું બદલાઈ ગયું.
એક દિવસ મારા બોસે કહ્યું:
“વર્ડપ્રેસ સાઈટ માં પોસ્ટ સાઇડબારમાં કન્ટેન્ટ ઉમેરો.”
હું ચોંકી ગઈ.
મને વર્ડપ્રેસ આવડતું નહોતું.
પણ મેં હાર ના માની.
સર્ચ કર્યું, શીખ્યું, અને કામ પૂર્ણ કર્યું
એ એક કામે મારી દિશા બદલી દીધી.
વર્ડપ્રેસની શોધ
વર્ડપ્રેસ શીખતા શીખતા સમજાયું કે આ ખૂબ પાવરફુલ પ્લેટફોર્મ છે.
ઓછા કોડ સાથે, આપણે ઝડપી, વધુ સારી અને સ્માર્ટ વેબસાઇટ બનાવી શકીએ છીએ.
૨૦૧૫ માં, મેં વર્ડપ્રેસ પર સંપૂર્ણ ધ્યાન કેન્દ્રિત કરવાનું નક્કી કર્યું. અને તે નિર્ણયથી મારું જીવન બદલાઈ ગયું.
સ્વતંત્રતાની પસંદગી
૨૦૧૮ માં, મેં બીજું એક મોટું પગલું ભર્યું – મેં મારી નોકરી છોડી દીધી.
મેં વર્ડપ્રેસ ડેવલપર તરીકે રિમોટલી કામ કરવાનું શરૂ કર્યું.
તે જોખમી હતું… પણ તેનાથી મને સ્વતંત્રતા મળી.
વૈશ્વિક સ્તરે કામ કરવાની સ્વતંત્રતા.
વિકાસ કરવાની સ્વતંત્રતા.
મોટા સ્વપ્ન જોવાની સ્વતંત્રતા.
Contributor બનવું
મેં વર્ડપ્રેસ રિપોઝીટરીમાં બે પ્લગઇન્સ બનાવ્યા:
Contact Information Widget
Shital Quiz Cloner for LearnDash
મારા plugins નો ઉપયોગ લોકો કરે છે — એ જોવું ખૂબ સંતોષકારક હતું.
મેં Core, Meta, Polyglots માં યોગદાન આપવાનું શરૂ કર્યું.
હું વર્ડપ્રેસ Core અને Meta Contributor બની.
મેં અનેક વર્ડપ્રેસ પ્રકાશનોમાં યોગદાન આપ્યું.
જેમાં શામેલ છે:
4.9 “Tipton”, 4.9.5 સુરક્ષા અને જાળવણી પ્રકાશન, 5.0 “Bebo”, 5.1 “Betty”, 5.2 “Jaco”, 5.3 “Kirk”, 5.4 “Adderley”, 5.5 “Eckstine”, 5.6 “Simone”, 5.7 “Esperanza”, 5.8 “Tatum”, 5.9 “Josephine”, 6.0 “Arturo”, અને 6.6 “Dorsey”
વર્ડપ્રેસ 5.6 રિલીઝ પ્લાનિંગ માટે મહિલા સ્ક્વોડનો ભાગ બનવાનું મને પણ સન્માન મળ્યું.
ડિઝાઇન, ટેક અને લીડમાં મારું નામ “શીતલ મારકણા” જોવું એ એક અવિસ્મરણીય ક્ષણ હતી.
અને મને
વર્ડપ્રેસ 5.6 રિલીઝ પ્લાનિંગ માટે મહિલા સ્ક્વોડ
માં પસંદ થવાનો ગર્વ મળ્યો.
ભારતમાં વર્ડકેમ્પના અનુભવો
મુંબઈમાં મારો પહેલો વર્ડકેમ્પ એક અદ્ભુત અનુભવ હતો.
મને સમજાયું —
વર્ડપ્રેસ ફક્ત કોડ નથી…
એ કોમ્યુનિટી છે.
મેં મુંબઈ, નાગપુર અને અમદાવાદના વર્ડકેમ્પમાં હાજરી આપી.
દરેકે મને વિકાસ કરવામાં મદદ કરી.
વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયાનું સપનું
વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયા મારું સ્વપ્ન હતું
પરંતુ આર્થિક રીતે, તે મુશ્કેલ હતું.
તેથી મેં લાઇવ સ્ટ્રીમ્સ જોઈ
મેં ઓનલાઈન શીખ્યું
પ્રેરણા જાળવી રાખી
અને મેં રાહ જોઈ…
સપનાનું સાકાર થવું
આખરે સપનું પૂરું થયું
મને વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયામાં volunteer તરીકે પસંદ કરવામાં આવી.
અને મને ઝીલ ઠક્કર શિષ્યવૃત્તિ પણ મળી.
સૌથી ખાસ વાત?
મેં મારા પરિવાર સાથે હાજરી આપી.
મારા પતિએ મને સાથ આપ્યો.
મારા 4 વર્ષના પુત્ર, મંત્રએ દરેક ક્ષણનો આનંદ માણ્યો.
આ ફક્ત મારી સફર નહોતી – તે અમારી સફર બની ગઈ.
વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયામાં Volunteer
Volunteer મારા જીવનના સૌથી અર્થપૂર્ણ અનુભવોમાંનો એક હતો.
મેં વિશ્વભરના લોકો સાથે કામ કર્યું.
અંતે, મને મારું volunteer પ્રમાણપત્ર મળ્યું.
એ ફક્ત પ્રમાણપત્ર નહોતું — એ મારી સફરની ઓળખ હતી.
વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયાએ મને શું આપ્યું?
શું તેણે મને નાણાકીય સ્વતંત્રતા આપી?
તરત નહીં.
શું તેણે મને community આપી?
હા.
શું તેણે મને વૈશ્વિક સ્તરે એક્સપોઝર આપ્યો?
ચોક્કસ.
પણ સૌથી મહત્વનું—
દિશા આપી.
નિષ્કર્ષ
જ્યારે હું મારી સફર પર પાછળ ફરીને જોઉં છું, ત્યારે તે હિંમત, વિશ્વાસ અને વિકાસની વાર્તા જેવું લાગે છે.
વર્ડપ્રેસ એક જિજ્ઞાસાથી શરૂ થયું…
પણ એ મારી ઓળખ બની ગયું.
નાના ગામથી વૈશ્વિક મંચ સુધી,
આ સફરે મને બદલાવી દીધી.
શંકા હતી.
ડર હતો.
પણ હું અટકી નહીં
વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયા મારા જીવનનો turning point બન્યો.
તેણે મને ફક્ત પરિણામો જ આપ્યા નહીં—
તેણે મને દિશા આપી.
તે માત્ર સફળતા નથી આપી—
તે સંભાવના આપી.
તેણે ફક્ત મારા વર્તમાનને જ બદલ્યો નહીં—
તેણે મારા ભવિષ્યને આકાર આપ્યો.
વર્ડપ્રેસે મને આત્મવિશ્વાસ આપ્યો. તેણે મને અવાજ આપ્યો. તેણે મને એક community આપી.
અને આજે હું જાણું છું—
આ ફક્ત હું શું કરું છું એ નથી—આ હું કોણ બની ગઈ છું, અને આગળ શું બની રહી છું તેની સફર છે.
एक छोटे से गांव से WordCamp Asia तक: मेरी WordPress यात्रा
शीतल को अपना निबंध अपनी ही आवाज़ में पढ़ते हुए सुनें!
जिज्ञासा से योगदान तक — कैसे WordPress ने मुझे करियर, आत्मविश्वास और वैश्विक अवसर दिए
परिचय
हर सफ़र एक छोटे कदम से शुरू होता है, जो अक्सर क्लैरिटी के बजाय क्यूरिऑसिटी से इंस्पायर्ड होता है। मेरा टेक्नोलॉजी के साथ सफ़र भी ऐसा ही था — कोई प्लान नहीं था, बस एक सवाल था: मुझे क्या सीखना चाहिए?
एक छोटे से गाँव से आने के कारण जहाँ कंप्यूटर का इस्तेमाल बहुत कम होता था, मैंने कभी नहीं सोचा था कि एक दिन मैं एक ग्लोबल कम्युनिटी का हिस्सा बनूंगी और WordCamp Asia जैसे इंटरनेशनल इवेंट में शामिल होऊंगी।
मेरा रास्ता ट्रेडिशनल नहीं था। मैं किसी टेक्निकल बैकग्राउंड से नहीं थी, न ही मेरे पास कोई क्लियर रोडमैप था। लेकिन मेरे पास जो था वह थी क्यूरिऑसिटी, डिटरमिनेशन और सीखने की इच्छा ।
समय के साथ, यह क्यूरिऑसिटी धीरे-धीरे एक स्किल में बदल गई, एक स्किल करियर में बदल गई, और एक करियर ने मुझे WordPress कम्युनिटी से जोड़ा।
यह कहानी है कि कैसे WordPress मेरे सैटिस्फैक्शन और खुशी का सोर्स बन गया ।
प्रारंभिक जीवन और शिक्षा
मैं एक छोटे से गांव से हूं, जहां टेक्नोलॉजी में मौके कम थे। हायर एजुकेशन के लिए मैं राजकोट शहर चली गई।
कई स्टूडेंट्स की तरह, मैंने भी ट्रेडिशनल एकेडमिक रास्ता अपनाया और केमिस्ट्री में बैचलर ऑफ़ साइंस की डिग्री पूरी की।
लेकिन, अपनी डिग्री पूरी करने के बाद, मुझे अपने भविष्य को लेकर पक्का नहीं लग रहा था।
केमिस्ट्री मेरा सब्जेक्ट था, लेकिन यह मेरा पैशन नहीं था।
तभी मैंने कंप्यूटर सीखने का फैसला किया।
कंप्यूटर यात्रा की शुरुआत
2009 में, मैंने कंप्यूटर इंजीनियरिंग कोर्स में एडमिशन लिया। मेरे लिए सब कुछ नया था – प्रोग्रामिंग, लॉजिक और टेक्निकल कॉन्सेप्ट।
यह आसान नहीं था, खासकर नॉन-टेक्निकल बैकग्राउंड से होने के कारण। लेकिन मैंने सीखने का पक्का इरादा कर लिया था।
मैंने 3 महीने का ट्रेनिंग प्रोग्राम जॉइन किया लेकिन उसे सिर्फ़ 1.5 महीने में पूरा कर लिया। उस समय, मेरे पास एक चॉइस थी:
इंतज़ार करें… या रिस्क लें?
मैंने रिस्क लेने का फैसला किया।
मैंने नौकरी के लिए अप्लाई किया – और मैं PHP वेब डेवलपर के तौर पर चुन ली गई।
उस पल ने मेरी ज़िंदगी बदल दी।
PHP में करियर बनाना
अगले पांच सालों तक मैंने कोर PHP डेवलपर के तौर पर काम किया।
फिर एक दिन सब कुछ बदल गया।
एक दिन मेरे बॉस ने कहा:
“WordPress साइट में पोस्ट साइडबार में कंटेंट डालदो।”
मैं चौंक गई।
मैं वर्डप्रेस नहीं जानती थी।
लेकिन मैंने हार नहीं मानी।
खोजा, सीखा और काम पूरा किया।
उस एक चीज़ ने मेरी दिशा बदल दी।
वर्डप्रेस खोज
वर्डप्रेस सीखते समय मुझे एहसास हुआ कि यह बहुत पावरफुल प्लेटफार्म है।
कम कोड के साथ, हम तेज़, बेहतर और स्मार्ट वेबसाइट बना सकते हैं।
2015 में, मैंने पूरी तरह से वर्डप्रेस पर फोकस करने का फैसला किया। और उस फैसले ने मेरी ज़िंदगी बदल दी।
स्वतंत्रता का विकल्प
2018 में, मैंने एक और बड़ा कदम उठाया – मैंने अपनी नौकरी छोड़ दी।
मैंने वर्डप्रेस डेवलपर के तौर पर रिमोटली काम करना शुरू कर दिया।
यह रिस्की था… लेकिन इसने मुझे आज़ादी दी।
ग्लोबल लेवल पर काम करने की आज़ादी।
ग्रो करने की आज़ादी।
बड़े सपने देखने की आज़ादी।
कंट्रीब्यूटर बनना
मैंने वर्डप्रेस रिपॉजिटरी में दो प्लगइन्स बनाए:
Contact Information Widget
Shital Quiz Cloner for LearnDash
लोगों को मेरे काम का इस्तेमाल करते देखना बहुत अच्छा लगा।
मैंने कोर, मेटा, पॉलीग्लॉट्स में योगदान देना शुरू कर दिया।
मैं WordPress Core और Meta Contributor बन गई
मैंने कई WordPress पब्लिकेशन में योगदान दिया है
जिसमें शामिल हैं:
4.9 “Tipton”, 4.9.5 સુરક્ષા અને જાળવણી પ્રકાશન, 5.0 “Bebo”, 5.1 “Betty”, 5.2 “Jaco”, 5.3 “Kirk”, 5.4 “Adderley”, 5.5 “Eckstine”, 5.6 “Simone”, 5.7 “Esperanza”, 5.8 “Tatum”, 5.9 “Josephine”, 6.0 “Arturo”, અને 6.6 “Dorsey”
मुझे WordPress 5.6 रिलीज़ प्लानिंग के लिए महिला टीम का हिस्सा बनकर भी सम्मानित महसूस हुआ।
डिजाइन, टेक और लीड में अपना नाम “शीतल मारकना” देखना एक यादगार पल था।
और मुझे WordPress 5.6 रिलीज़ प्लानिंग के लिए विमेंस स्क्वाड में चुने जाने पर गर्व हुआ।
भारत में वर्डकैंप के अनुभव
मुंबई में मेरा पहला WordCamp था, वो मेरा एक शानदार अनुभव था।
मुझे एहसास हुआ —
WordPress सिर्फ़ कोड के बारे में नहीं है…
यह लोगों के बारे में है।
मैंने मुंबई, नागपुर और अहमदाबाद में WordCamps में हिस्सा लिया।
हर एक ने मुझे आगे बढ़ने में मदद की।
वर्डकैंप एशिया का सपना
वर्डकैंप एशिया मेरा सपना था।
लेकिन फाइनेंशियली यह मुश्किल था।
तो मैंने लाइव स्ट्रीम देखी।
मैंने ऑनलाइन सीखा।
प्रेरित रहें।
और मैंने इंतज़ार किया…
सपने सच हों
आखिरकार सपना सच हो गया।
मुझे वर्डकैंप एशिया में वॉलंटियर के तौर पर चुना गया।
और मुझे झील ठक्कर स्कॉलरशिप भी मिली।
सबसे खास बात?
मैं अपने परिवार के साथ गई थी।
मेरे पति ने मेरा साथ दिया।
मेरे 4 साल के बेटे, मंत्र ने हर पल का आनंद लिया।
यह सिर्फ़ मेरी यात्रा नहीं थी – यह हमारी यात्रा बन गई।
वर्डकैंप एशिया में वॉलंटियरिंग
वॉलंटियरिंग मेरे जीवन के सबसे सार्थक अनुभवों में से एक था।
मैंने दुनिया भर के लोगों के साथ काम किया।
आखिरकार, मुझे अपना वॉलंटियर सर्टिफिकेट मिल गया।
यह सिर्फ एक सर्टिफिकेट नहीं था – यह मेरी यात्रा की पहचान थी।
वर्डकैंप एशिया ने मुझे क्या दिया?
क्या इससे मुझे फाइनेंशियल फ्रीडम मिली?
अभी नहीं.
क्या उसने मुझे कम्युनिटी दी?
हाँ।
क्या इससे मुझे ग्लोबल लेवल पर पहचान मिली?
बिल्कुल।
लेकिन सबसे महत्वपूर्ण बात यह है कि—
दिशा दी।
निष्कर्ष
जब मैं अपने सफ़र को पीछे मुड़कर देखती हूँ, तो यह हिम्मत, विश्वास और तरक्की की कहानी लगती है।
WordPress एक जिज्ञासा से शुरू हुआ था…
लेकिन यह मेरी पहचान बन गया।
एक छोटे से गाँव से ग्लोबल स्टेज तक
इस सफ़र ने मुझे बदल दिया।
शक था।
डर था।
लेकिन मैं रुकी नहीं।
WordCamp Asia मेरी ज़िंदगी का टर्निंग पॉइंट था।
इसने मुझे सिर्फ़ रिज़ल्ट ही नहीं दिए—
इसने मुझे दिशा दी।
इसने मुझे सिर्फ़ सफलता ही नहीं दी—
इसने मुझे संभावना दी।
इसने सिर्फ़ मेरा आज ही नहीं बदला—
इसने मेरे भविष्य को बनाया।
WordPress ने मुझे कॉन्फिडेंस दिया। इसने मुझे एक आवाज़ दी। इसने मुझे एक कम्युनिटी दी।
और आज मैं जानती हूँ—
यह सिर्फ मेरा काम नहीं है—
यह वह है जो मैं बन चुकी हूँ,
और जो मैं अभी बन रही हूँ।
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😊 From a Small Village to WordCamp Asia: My WordPress Journey 🌍✨
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by Shital Marakana at April 22, 2026 12:00 PM
Open Channels FM
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In this episode, co-hosts discuss WooCommerce automation with expert James Collins, emphasizing how tools like Zapier streamline tasks, reduce errors, and enhance efficiency through practical automation examples and AI advancements.
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Carlos Bravo
Redesigned my blog in a day with Claude + Studio
I’ve just redone my personal website in a day. My tools:
Claude desktop. Opus 4.7 on High.
Caveman
plugin for token simplification.
Agents orchestration.
One for design. One for copy. One for development.
WordPress Studio
as the local environment.
WordPress.com
as the hosting.
Studio’s sync has been delightful, but still there is a need for “only site editing related sync” option, as you may lose some content if you mess with pull-push ( writing a post on production, not pulling, and then pushing a change you did with the site editor with local ( via database). I may open a PR.
So, to start the “redesign”, I opened the Studio app, clicked on add site and pulled this existing site.
Once that was done, I shared the site folder with Claude desktop and wrote my specs as user stories. Told it about myself, shared my LinkedIn profile, social media and, most important, my public work on GitHub (closed PRs in Gutenberg, wordpress-develop, and SCF).
A bit of testing, some copy changes, small fixes, and then Sync → Push.
Et voilà. Site done. Could be better, still good enough for a personal blog.
by Carlos Bravo at April 22, 2026 11:03 AM
April 20, 2026
Jonathan Desrosiers
Reblog of Boston WordPress: April 2026 Meetup: Ethan Marcotte & Mary Hubbard
Reblog via
Jonathan Desrosiers
WordPress is software with limitless potential and a mission to make publishing accessible to the whole world. Boston is a city with prolific, world-renowned universities, vibrant tech communities, and an incredible spirit. One of the reasons why I help organize this meetup is because I have seen first-hand the opportunities it creates for attendees when these groups come together.
While I look forward to our meetups each and every month, our speaker lineup for April has me even more excited than usual. If you’ve been meaning to attend a WordPress Boston meetup event and just haven’t gotten around to it, this is the month you should finally make it happen.
Event Details
Date:
April 27, 2026
Time:
6:30PM-9:00PM
Location:
Microsoft New England Research and Development (NERD) Center
1 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142
You must RSVP to attend.
More details and the RSVP form can be
found on the meetup.com event page
A Local Pioneer
I checked my email one day last September to find a new post from
Ethan Marcotte’s journal
. He wrote about how he was looking for his next endeavor having just finished a project with the
City of Boston
where he helped the
Digital Services team
define a new design system. I realized I had forgotten that he was based in Boston.
Anyone and everyone is welcome to speak at our meetups so long as the topic is useful in some way to those who use or build with WordPress (
submit a talk proposal
if you think that’s you)! While we occasionally have speakers from out of town when logistics line up right, it’s very important to me that the meetup is a platform for celebrating and showcasing the amazing talents from the greater Boston area. The organizing team regularly performs outreach to individuals who we feel can offer valuable insight to the attendees of our meetup. I’m someone who tends to aim high. The worst case scenario: you don’t receive an answer or they politely decline.
I reached out through his website’s contact form and I’m glad I did! After a bit of coordination and planning, we landed on April’s meetup for him to give his talk
The design systems between us
In case you’re unfamiliar with Ethan, here’s a bit more about him.
WordPress 7.0 and Beyond
While featuring local talent is important to the organizing team, another factor that we’re always trying to balance in our programming is bringing in leaders from outside of the Bay State. Again aiming high, I reached out to Mary Hubbard about having her speak at our meetup. As the Executive Director of the WordPress Project, there’s few people in a better position to present about where WordPress is going and the impact it will have on creators and local businesses.
After some back and forth, April also ended up as the best month to fit our meetup into her busy schedule. Meetups are a critical part of the overall WordPress equation and one of the reasons why it has grown to the Open Source giant it is today. We’re grateful for her willingness to attend our meetup to engage with our community by talking about what the 7.0 release mans for the project, and how community events like our meetup can play a role in the next 20 years of WordPress.
The post
April 2026 Meetup: Ethan Marcotte & Mary Hubbard
appeared first on
Boston WordPress
The post
Reblog of Boston WordPress: April 2026 Meetup: Ethan Marcotte & Mary Hubbard
appeared first on
Jonathan Desrosiers
by Jonathan Desrosiers at April 20, 2026 07:45 PM
April 18, 2026
Gutenberg Times
WordCamp Asia, Block Themes, AI in WordPress, WooCommerce 10.7– Weekend Edition 363
Hi there,
I am just back from my fourth WordCamp Asia and it was again fantastic! I also enjoyed Mumbai as a city to visit. The energy in the streets, the kindness of the people, the historic sites of many cultures and the deliciousness of the food. It was all an adventure!
Huge Kudos to all the people who put together a phenomenal WordCamp. It’s a lot of work, and it takes dedication, perseverance and an incredible amount of details to bring it all together for ca 2300 people to have a good time. And I am excited for next year to revisit India for the first WordCamp India as a fourth flagship event.
The angels behind the scenes already uploaded all 48 session videos to YouTube to the
WordCamp Asia 2026 playlist
on the WordPress channel.
And just in time for this Weekend Edition,
WordCamp Europe announced their schedule
, with two tracks for talks and two for workshops. In a few weeks, on June 4-6, 2026, roughly 1500 people will descend on Krakow, Poland. Will you be there?
If you would rather not get across the pond, there are a few WordCamps on the calendar in the US, too:
WordCamp Santa Clarita
, May 15-16, 2026
WordCamp US
August 16-19, 2026
WordCamp NYC is in early planning stage
A full
list of all planned WordCamps in various stages
is available at WordCamp.org
What else is in this Weekend Edition? AI in WordPress, block theme and plugin updates and more…
Have fun!
Yours,
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Miguel Fonseca
recaps
what’s new in Gutenberg 22.9
a focused release across 131 merged PRs. The headline addition is background gradient support for the Group block, letting you layer gradients over background images for the first time. The command palette gains organized sections for recent commands and contextual suggestions — experimental, opt-in via Gutenberg Experiments. Real-time collaboration gets stability fixes: block notes now sync without a page refresh, and the stuck “Join” button in the post list is resolved.
The latest episode is
Gutenberg Changelog #129 Artificial Intelligence, WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8
with Beth Soderberg, of BeThink Studio
Anne McCarthy
introduces the
Twenty Twenty-Seven team
Henrique Iamarino
leads design, with
Maggie Cabrera
and
Carolina Nymark
as co-lead developers. The standout addition is
Juanfra Aldasoro
stepping into a newly created lead mentor role — a deliberate move to make theme contribution more structured and welcoming for newer contributors. Starting earlier than previous default theme cycles gives the team room to be more intentional: the goal isn’t just a great theme, but growing the number of people who feel capable of contributing to WordPress theme work at all.
WordPress 7.0
The release date is still pending. An update is expected on or before April 22, 2026, next week. Stay tuned.
Benjamin Zekavica
, previous Core team rep, offers a practical pre-flight checklist to
prepare your plugins and sites for WordPress 7.0
: if your plugins still use metaboxes, real-time collaboration will silently break for your users — migration time is now. PHP 7.2 and 7.3 are gone, MySQL minimum jumps to 8.0, and API keys in the new Connectors screen sit unencrypted in
wp_options
until Trac #64789 lands, so use environment variables instead. The iframed editor isn’t enforced in 7.0 core yet, but test your v2 blocks in the Gutenberg plugin today.
Core AI team member
Darin Kotter
cuts through the noise in
WP 7.0 + AI
: WordPress 7.0 ships AI infrastructure, not AI features. Your site won’t suddenly start firing off AI requests when you update. What lands in core are the provider-agnostic AI Client PHP API, the new Connectors API for managing external service authentication, and client-side enhancements to the Abilities API. Actual AI providers, features, and MCP integration all arrive via separate plugins — your choice, your setup.
Nevertheless,
Depak Gupta
,freelance developer from Mumbai and contributor on the Core AI team, published a plugin to
Turn of all AI Features
via the
Settings > General
page or via command line.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Jamie Marsland
poses an interesting question in
The future of WordPress after blocks
: what if the builder isn’t human? He suggests that blocks were made for people—easy to understand but difficult for AI to interpret. He envisions a future where meaning is more important than layout, editing becomes conversations, and WordPress transforms from a site builder to a content operating system.
Shani Banerjee
highlights the new features in
WooCommerce 10.7
, mainly focusing on performance boosts: improvements on the high-performance order storage (HPOS) reduce the number of database queries by 51%, and using object cache significantly cuts down checkout query counts. There are also updated analytics export filters that accurately reflect currency for background jobs, a new beta PHP API for handling orders, fixes for the Cart and Checkout blocks, better contrast for accessibility, and increased security for order notes in the REST API and AJAX handlers. Banerjee has all the salient details for you.
Speaking of WooCommerce,
Wes Theron
walks you through the new course,
Build your store with WooCommerce
on WordPress.com. It’s free and beginner-friendly. You’ll learn everything you need to launch and manage an online store. In about an hour of bite-size video lessons, you’ll work through products, payments, shipping, taxes, and order management at your own pace, ending with a fully functional store and the confidence to run it day to day.
Derek Hanson
‘s
Cover Block Parallax Style v1.2.0
is more bug-fix than feature release. The most visible fix: the editor and frontend were using different default speeds, so what you previewed wasn’t what visitors saw. Two mobile-handling bugs got squashed — the original global viewport check meant parallax would never initialize after resizing from mobile to desktop. The main new feature is a per-block “Disable on mobile” toggle, replacing the blunt all-or-nothing approach. Background oversizing also bumped from 130% to 140%, matching what production parallax libraries use.
Elliott Richmond
continues his WordPress.com series with
Design Your WordPress Homepage with Twenty Twenty-Five
, switching to the core theme he contributed to and building a hero section, call to action, and quick links grid — properly, using blocks the way they were designed. In 12 minutes you’ll learn how Groups, Covers, Grids, Global Styles, and Patterns fit together, and why understanding what’s happening under the hood makes all the difference to your layouts.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
At WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai, I ran a block theme development workshop and whether you were there or couldn’t get a seat, the
ull workshop bundle is now on GitHub
— everything you need to build
Concrete & Light
, a portfolio theme, entirely through the Site Editor. Three guided exercises walk you through styling headers and footers, setting global element styles, and creating dynamic page and archive templates. You can be up and running in minutes via WordPress Studio, the Studio CLI, or directly in WordPress Playground.
Jonathan Bossenger
documents
how he built a custom WordPress block theme using Claude and MCP tools
— no CLI, no code editor, just conversation. WordPress.com MCP tools let Claude audit his live site directly; WordPress Studio MCP tools wrote the theme files into his local environment. The key lesson: AI got him 80% there fast, but converting Claude’s raw HTML output into proper editable block markup still required a human in the loop — and Claude Code to help get it done.
Yann Collet
, founder of Twentig, has launched
Twentig One
, a new free WordPress block theme built for the site editor. Lightweight and flexible, it offers templates, post formats, color presets, font pairings, and fluid spacing out of the box. Four starter sites — Business, Portfolio, Blog, and Personal — get you up and running quickly, with more on the way.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2025”
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly.
The previous years are also available:
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Eric Karkovack
walks you through
using the Remote Data Blocks plugin to pull Google Sheets data into WordPress
step by step. The plugin connects to Airtable, Shopify, and Google Sheets out of the box, with HTTP support for other sources. Most of the setup time goes into Google Cloud Platform — creating a project, enabling APIs, and generating JSON credentials. Once connected, your spreadsheet data renders via a block and a customizable pattern directly in the editor.
Varun Dubey
shares a hard-won lesson in
CLAUDE.md for WordPress Developers: Why Layered Knowledge Beats a Bigger File
when your instructions file hits 400 lines, more rules aren’t the fix. His solution is four distinct layers — rules in CLAUDE.md, facts in memory, procedures in skills, and capabilities in MCP servers — each loaded only when relevant. For WordPress developers already running Claude Code and feeling the weight of their own instructions pile up, this is the cleanup framework you didn’t know you needed.
AI and WordPress
Jeffrey Paul
announces two quick releases of the WordPress AI plugin.
Version 0.6.0
marked a shift toward connected publishing workflows — image editing and refinement landed as a full Feature, and the plugin was renamed from “AI Experiments” to simply “AI.” Now
0.7.0 is out
expanding editorial workflows further: Content Classification suggests categories and tags from your post content, Meta Description Generation handles SEO descriptions without leaving the editor, and bulk alt text generation lets you process your entire Media Library at once. Your next stop is 0.8.0, where Content Provenance tracking via C2PA and a “Refine from Notes” experiment are already taking shape.
James LePage
, co-team rep of WordPress Core AI and head of AI at Automattic, catalogs
what the community is building on top of the WordPress AI infrastructure
ahead of 7.0. The volume is the point: ten community AI provider plugins, 70+ plugins adopting the Abilities API covering hundreds of millions of installs, dozens of MCP server implementations, fourteen agent skills, and tutorials in Japanese, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. WooCommerce, ACF, Ninja Forms, GravityKit, Yoast, and WP Engine are all in. None of it was dictated from the top — the community decided the building blocks were worth using. The post has about 180+ distinct resources and links. And LePage himself admits it’s not exhaustive.
JuanMa Garrido
shares hard-won lessons in
Using local AI models with WordPress 7.0: what I learned connecting Ollama
— the kind the official docs skip. The biggest gotcha: call
wp_ai_client_prompt()
at
init
priority 25 or later, not the default 10, or authentication won’t be wired up yet and you’ll get a silent “No models found.” He also covers how to allowlist localhost requests (blocked by WordPress’s SSRF protection by default), register fallback auth for keyless local providers, and use
is_supported_for_text_generation()
as a pre-flight check before committing to an API call.
Gary Pendergast
brings his AI writing experiment directly into the block editor with
Claudaborative Editing 0.4
The new WordPress plugin — available on GitHub now, pending directory approval — adds a sidebar menu with Compose, Proofread, Review, Edit, and Translate modes, plus a pre-publish panel that suggests tags, categories, and excerpts. You control how much the LLM does: it can fix things outright or just leave notes for you to act on. Gary uses it mainly for planning — to organize his thoughts before writing, not to write for him.
What’s new in Playground?
Fellyph Cintra
announces a new blueprint agent skill that
teaches your coding agent to write valid WordPress Playground Blueprints
from natural language prompts. Install it with one
npx
command and your agent gains a structured reference covering every Blueprint property, resource type, step sequence, and common pitfalls — so it stops guessing property names or forgetting
require '/wordpress/wp-load.php'
in
runPHP
steps. It works with Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Copilot, and Codex.
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Now also available via
WordPress Playground
. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it?
Email me
with your experience.
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send
them via email
or
Send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph
For questions to be answered on the
Gutenberg Changelog
send them to
changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
Featured Image:
by Birgit Pauli-Haack at April 18, 2026 01:55 AM
April 16, 2026
Open Channels FM
Podcasting 2.0: The Open Source Movement Reshaping How We Create and Consume Audio
This episode explores Podcasting 2.0, highlighting community-driven enhancements to RSS, the balance of distribution platforms, and evolving podcast formats.
by Bob Dunn at April 16, 2026 09:34 AM
Gutenberg Times
Building a block theme from scratch – Workshop resources
It was great fun to conduct a Workshop at WordCamp Asia contributor day. Roughly 100 students were in the class and it was a great interactive session. I also know that there were quite a few of you who didn’t get to join us because there wasn’t enough room.
Birgit Pauli-Haack workshop on the block editor and full-site editing was a highlight of the entire event. Her depth of knowledge and infectious enthusiasm for the future of WordPress left me inspired and ready to dive deeper. –
Kinjal Dwivedi
Special thanks to Birgit Pauli-Haack for the brilliant session on building block themes from scratch. –
Nikul Valani
Birgit Pauli-Haack’s Block Themes workshop was equally sharp, demystifying modern theme architecture in ways that clicked instantly.
Manisha Makhija
Building a Block Theme from Scratch by Birgit Pauli-Haack
– a great hands-on look at how Full Site Editing is shaping modern WordPress –
Fathima Begum
If you attended the
Block Theme Development
workshop at WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai and want to revisit the exercises, or if you couldn’t make it but want to work through it on your own, the complete
workshop bundle is available on GitHub
. Everything you need to follow along is included:
the reference theme,
demo content with media,
step-by-step instructions to start your theme, and
a blueprint to set up a local site with WordPress Studio or with WordPress Playground.
You can get started within minutes.
If you have used the Site Editor to customize a theme but have not yet built one from scratch, this workshop is a great next step. The exercises stay entirely within the visual editor. By the end, you will have a working portfolio theme and a solid understanding of how template parts, patterns, global styles, and custom templates fit together. Using the
Create Block theme plugin
, you can save all your changes in the new theme files, export it and use it on other websites.
A quick primer before you start
Before jumping into the exercises, it is worth reviewing the
workshop slide deck
. If you are coming from classic WordPress themes, the mental model is different. A block theme replaces PHP template files with HTML templates built from block markup, and it replaces scattered CSS with a single
theme.json
file that defines your colors, typography, spacing, and layout in one place. Templates and template parts live in their own folders, and every piece of them is made of blocks.
The Site Editor is where it all comes together. It gives you a visual canvas for designing templates, setting global styles, and previewing changes in real time. Developers ship defaults through
theme.json
; site owners customize through the Site Editor. When a user makes a change in the editor, it takes precedence over the theme default. Understand that layering is key before you dive into the exercises.
What the workshop covers
The workshop walks you through building
Concrete & Light
, a block theme for a fictional heritage architecture studio based in Mumbai. Rather than starting from theory, you start from a working site with real content — five pages and three project posts — and progressively shape the design through the Site Editor.
Three guided exercises take you from basics to custom templates:
Exercise 1: Styling the Header.
You install fonts (Jost and Playfair Display), set up a semantic color palette, configure typography presets, and transform the default header into a dark, minimal navigation bar with uppercase text and an accent border. This is where you get comfortable with global styles and template parts.
Exercise 2: Footer and Global Elements.
You build a four-column footer with studio branding, page links, social channels, and addresses. Then you style headings, links, and buttons across the entire site to ensure design consistency. By the end, you understand how global element styles cascade through your theme.
Exercise 3: Page Templates.
This is where it gets interesting. You create a Landing Page template with a full-viewport hero image, a 40% overlay, and a dynamically pulled page title — no hardcoded text. Then you build a Category Projects template with a three-column query loop grid, giving you hands-on experience with archive templates and dynamic content.
You use the visual tools WordPress provides and see the results immediately. The
Create Block Theme
plugin is pre-installed so you can export your modifications as a proper theme at any point.
Getting started on your own
You have three options for setting up your site:
A visual app,
WordPress Studio
can import the included blueprint and have your site ready in a couple of minutes.
Using the command line, the Studio CLI will do the same thing with a single command.
Or skip the install entirely,
open the workshop site directly in WordPress Playground
— it loads right in your browser with all the content and plugins already in place.
Instructions
for installing WordPress Studio or using the Studio CLI for the workshop are also available.
Whichever route you choose, the blueprint automatically installs WordPress, activates the required plugins, imports all demo content and media, and configures the site settings.
Once your site is running, open the
exercise instructions on GitHub
and work through them at your own pace. The instructions include color references, specific block settings, and enough context that you should not get stuck even without a workshop facilitator in the room.
The
full workshop bundle
is on GitHub. Fork it, clone it, or just download the ZIP. And if you build something with it, we would love to hear about it.
If you have trouble or run into problems, email pauli@gutenbergtimes.com or ping me on WP Slack or create an issue or discussion on GitHub
Attended the workshop “Building a Block Theme from Scratch” by Birgit Pauli-Haack , WordPress Core Contributor and it completely changed how I look at modern WordPress development.
Key takeaways :
• Block-based themes are shaping the future of WordPress
• Flexibility and customization are now more powerful than ever
• Modern theme development is all about blocks, not templates
It was an amazing learning experience and a great opportunity to connect with such an inspiring community.
Aman Reddy
Resources to learn more
Slidedeck: Building a block theme from scratch
Theme Handbook
on WordPress.org
Setup Instructions
GitHub Repo
with instructions for the workshop
List of tutorials on theme.json
on the WordPress developer blog
Full site editing for theme developers
by Carolina Nymark
by Birgit Pauli-Haack at April 16, 2026 09:23 AM
April 15, 2026
WPTavern
#212 – Anne Bovelett on How Web Accessibility Boosts Traffic, SEO, and Revenue
Transcript
[00:00:19]
Nathan Wrigley:
Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
[00:00:26] Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how web accessibility boosts traffic, SEO, and revenue.
[00:00:39] If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
[00:00:56] If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.
[00:01:13] So on the podcast today we have Anne Bovelett.
[00:01:16] Anne is a seasoned accessibility strategist with many years of experience in the tech industry. Her journey into accessible design began several years ago, and since then, she’s become a passionate advocate for making the web a more inclusive place. Especially for WordPress users and developers. Drawing from her background in consulting, training, and her own experiences, Anne’s work focuses on the intersection of accessibility, universal design, and tangible business outcomes.
[00:01:46] This episode explores accessibility, not just as a moral imperative, but as a strategic advantage for website owners and businesses. Anne explains how neglecting accessibility means you are leaving serious money on the table, referencing compelling research from a variety of credible sources. These studies reveal practical data. Compliant sites enjoy increases in organic traffic, a boost in keyword rankings, stronger authority, and significant financial opportunities, sometimes running into millions and even billions.
[00:02:22] Anne talks about why accessibility hasn’t always been prioritised on the web, using analogies of the physical world, and the history of web development. She gets into the technical side as well, but this conversation is specifically geared towards the real world, bottom line, business benefits of accessible websites. Reach more users, boost revenue, and even reduce support costs.
[00:02:46] If you’re a website owner, developer, or digital business leader who’s ever wondered whether accessibility is worth it, this episode is for you.
[00:02:57] If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
[00:03:07] And so without further delay, I bring you Anne Bovelett.
[00:03:17] I am joined on the podcast by Anne Bovelett. Hello Anne.
[00:03:20]
Anne Bovelett:
Hi Nathan. Thank you for having me today.
[00:03:23]
Nathan Wrigley:
You are very welcome. Anne and I have been talking for quite a long time before we hit record and we’ve covered a lot of ground. But the ground that we’re going to cover today is all to do with accessibility, your WordPress website and why, well, why you are leaving money on the table if you are not pursuing the accessibility goals that you probably should be in the year 2026.
[00:03:43] Before we begin that, I guess it would be a good idea for you, Anne, to give us your credentials. Tell us a little bit about you and how come you get to speak authoritatively about accessibility in WordPress. So over to you, give us your bio.
[00:03:55]
Anne Bovelett:
It’s the most dangerous thing to ask me ever, right? Because I always talk too much.
[00:04:01] So let me do it differently this time. When I started figuring out about accessibility, about six years ago, I quickly realised that it’s not that complex to learn accessible coding. It’s not that complex to learn universal design principles. But what is hard for a lot of people working in accessibility is that many of them have this very social way of acting. I do too. I’m in it for the right reason, I think, because I want everybody to have freedom and also the freedom to make the same mistakes that we do, but also not to be constrained in any way.
[00:04:46] And then I was speaking to accessibility specialists, remediators, and in every layer of businesses, and I realised that they were being punched upon by organisations because they were just getting too many roles in one. The expectations were insane. So companies were 2 – 3000 people working for them, outputting I don’t know what kinds of digital products and websites, would expect one person to be the accessibility person to guard the compliance. And I mean this is a recipe for burnout 101.
[00:05:21] And one thing I don’t have a lack of is a big mouth. And one of the reasons why I started working for myself is because of that big mouth. I was not material to be hired, even though I managed to work for 22 years in employment. I realised at some point, if I ask a good fee, for some reason people take me seriously. Have you ever noticed that, Nathan? The more money you ask for, the more serious they’re going to take you. It’s absolutely ridiculous. But that’s what’s happening.
[00:05:59] And so I was trying to find my way in accessibility, like where do I fit in best? And then I thought, I’m going to be the flag bearer and I want to teach companies. And one of the things I like to do is to beat them with their own stick. Because I don’t care why someone makes whatever product, or whatever service they have accessible, I just care that they do. So if the stick that says money works, I’ll beat that. I’ll beat with that. It’s no doubt.
[00:06:35] And that’s where my career started changing, and especially since the past one and a half years. Someone said, you should change your job title. You should turn it into Accessibility Strategist. Well, here we are. I don’t care much for titles, but apparently that pretty much describes what I do.
[00:06:57]
Nathan Wrigley:
It’s kind of curious to me that if you were to, I say this phrase quite a lot on this podcast because there’s a lot of introspection going on and a lot of gazing back in time. It’s kind of curious that the accessibility bit never got importance from the get-go. And I mean right back from when the internet began.
[00:07:18] There was this great promise that suddenly great swathes of information, which would’ve been hither to unavailable to an awful lot of people, would suddenly be able to be parachuted into your living room via a computer and increasingly, you know, into your hand with a mobile phone.
[00:07:34] And yet the technology developed, the browsers developed, the web design industry developed, and it never got that importance. I’m genuinely puzzled by how that occurred. How it is that we all ignored that. And it really is probably only within the last 3, 4, 5 years that this clarion call for accessibility has become mainstream. I know that there’s people that have been banging the gong probably right from the beginning, but it has been largely ignored and I find that really curious.
[00:08:07]
Anne Bovelett:
I think that is due to two things. First of all, because people approach this as a purely social issue that needs to be resolved, and that people can’t imagine that they have certain users, which is arrogance at its finest. But, you know, that’s another topic.
[00:08:27] The other thing is good intentions. Like they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? Because in the beginning of the internet, when things got more colour, I always say this is the point, where things got more colourful, when Google was still small, when Alta Vista was still a thing and Yahoo and you remember, and I think we had four digit or five digit numbers for ICQ members. Actually the HTML, the sites were pretty ugly, right? They were fugly, I would say. I remember we had to build with tables and stuff, and then jump through hoops to make something look the way we wanted to.
[00:09:08] But the thing is, around that time, all we had was semantic HTML. We still have that, but back then it’s all we had. And because we were using semantic HTML, it was great for screen reader users, for example, and other assistive technology. But then everybody always wants to improve. They want to do better. And there is a German word for it, and I haven’t found the equivalent for that in English. We call it verschlimmbesserung. It literally means, instead of improving it, maybe down proving it. It’s like over-engineering.
[00:09:48] So this is what happened. And then people always want to work faster and they love building tools that help others, because in a sense, we are a social species, if you like it or not. We’re just social in the wrong things often, I think as a society. And from that perspective, there’ve been developers that had a great idea, said, let’s make frameworks, and then let’s make things easier for our fellow designers and developers.
[00:10:13] And very fast, at some point, semantic HTML was not a thing anymore because people were coding with div and span. And the div and span are the chameleons, the useless chameleons if you talk about accessibility, because you can make a div look like something, but you can’t make it behave like something until you put a ton of JavaScript on it. Div is like tofu without seasoning, right?
[00:10:41] And the same is with span. And because semantic elements like a button is challenging to style for some, a lot of frameworks came that used div and span a lot. And then they’re relying on JavaScript. And then these frameworks were growing and then at some point people were like, oh, this is the biggest framework used by everybody, so it must be good. That’s like saying the opinion of the majority is the truth. Unfortunately it’s not.
[00:11:15] That is my theory. I’m saying this more often. There was this time when everybody was doing Duolingo and then making big messages on social media, look, I’m on a 682.5 day streak in Duolingo, developers, right? And I’m like, why are you telling me about your streak for that but you can’t remember 50 semantic HTML elements? That’s very much also bashing the developer, which is pretty unfair because the problem is, with accessibility is, it’s not taken into account from the beginning.
[00:11:59] Let me compare that with another situation. So our family home burnt down to the ground and we had to rebuild, and then we got the chance to improve some things because we got modern stuff. And then, because we were building this community seminar centre at the same time, we needed to think about how we’re going to build the toilets, right? And then we had to go, and here, because the architect that helped us, he was nice guy, but he didn’t think about wheelchairs, about accessibility.
[00:12:32] At that time, I wasn’t thinking about accessibility or digital accessibility at all. But I was like, what if someone comes in with a wheelchair? Or what if we have a guest that weighs over 190 kilos? Will our toilet survive that? What kind of toilet do we need? And just close your eyes and go into that little toilet room, bathroom you call it, probably, and then close your eyes and imagine, okay, I have trouble moving, I have pain, I have rheumatism. I don’t but, you know, and I’m on a stick. Where do I put my stick? Do I have a place to put that in the corner? Can I reach for the paper?
[00:13:13] All these practical things. These are decisions that you take before you even start building the room. And it’s the same thing with anything else. Digital applications, terminals, elevators. I don’t know, anything. And the thing is, the better you do it, the less people have to ask questions afterwards about, how does this work?
[00:13:39]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because in the real world, I know that in the part of the world where I live, and I’ve made this comparison on different podcasts in the past. It’s so self-evident when somebody, for example, who’s using a wheelchair. It’s so self-evident when they can’t get in the building because, well, there they are at the door with some impediment. Maybe there’s three steps that are just unachievable. And it’s really obvious. There they are in the real world. You walk past and you notice it. It’s right there in front of you. Look, there’s a problem that needs to be solved.
[00:14:13] And so for the real world, the legislation in the part of the world where I am, came into effect many years ago. And so, for example, the ramps came in and all the premises that are publicly trading things must have ramps and so on and so forth.
[00:14:26] However, the internet is a different animal in that most of us are browsing in the comfort of our own home. Nobody has any idea what you are browsing. Nobody’s got any idea where it is failing for you because they’re not staring over your shoulder. And even if they were staring over their shoulder, it would be fairly hard for them to determine that, again, to use the metaphor of getting in the building, they wouldn’t see that you couldn’t get in the building even if they were watching your phone. It has to be reported by you, the user that can’t achieve the things. And so there’s this real kind of difficulty in matching it up.
[00:15:03] And also because a website kind of looks finished when it looks finished to most people, then you just put the tools away. There’s the website. It looks finished, so it is finished. We’re done. And of course, there’s this whole increasingly vocal cohort of people who, and we’ll get into them in a moment, who are not able to access these things, but they have to self-report.
[00:15:31] And who do you even report to? If I can’t access a building on my high street, let’s say the local library, I could probably even go to the police in all honesty. There’s a central place. I could go to the police, go to the council, and I could say, this must be fixed. And it, sure enough, it will be fixed. There is no equivalence here. Who would I go to to report a problem so that it will definitely be fixed.
[00:15:53] So there’s this whole sort of strange disconnect, which presents the problem of today. How do we encourage people who don’t get the self-reporting, that it’s a jolly good idea to fix the problems in advance?
[00:16:08]
Anne Bovelett:
Make it hurt.
[00:16:08]
Nathan Wrigley:
Or make it valuable, make the fix valuable. And in the scenario that you are describing today, we’re going to talk about some articles, one of which you’ve written, but also one which has been done by accessibilitychecker.org. We’re going to look into those. This is making the economic argument for doing it.
[00:16:26]
Anne Bovelett:
I’m sorry for interrupting you, but it was not just accessibilitychecker.org because then everybody’s going to go, oh, yeah, another accessibility site. This was Semrush. Semrush people. They did this together with accessibilitychecker.org.
[00:16:41]
Nathan Wrigley:
Sorry, I’m reading out the URL where I located it, so yeah. But the point being that there’s an economic imperative. And that kind of cuts through a lot, doesn’t it? You know, if you go to a business and you say to them, if we were to make this minor tweak with your business, we could increase your revenue by 0.5 of a percent. If we make these other tweaks, we can increase you by 8%, 9%, or what have you.
[00:17:04] Any business owner who hears those words is going to be curious. Okay, right, you’ve got my attention, now what? And although it kind of misses out the whole moral argument, like we should be making sites accessible just because that’s morally the right thing to do. Put that to one side. Let’s go with the economic imperative.
[00:17:23] So I will link in the show notes to anything that we mention today. So I’ll just drop that in. Go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Anne, and all the links will be provided there, as well, I might add with a transcript of everything that we say today.
[00:17:38] Tell us the sort of headline pieces that you found curious in the accessibilitychecker.org piece, which is obviously, as you said, created by Semrush amongst others.
[00:17:47]
Anne Bovelett:
I’m just looking at the first page from Semrush itself. And it was interesting because they actually have an infographic on it that says, summary of findings. That’s not accessible at all, but we used it in our Hackathon project last year. But they tested 10,000 websites. And this is actually what I, and many of the people in my line of work have been waiting for, data, data, data. Because this is what companies care about. And I understand that. You know, they are responsible for people’s salaries, not just the revenue and the turnover, but also for the people that they employ, right?
[00:18:27] And so in this research it showed, after 10,000 websites, that 70% of the sites were not compliant. Well, that’s not news, right? But the thing is, they found a 23% traffic increase tied to higher compliance. 27% more keywords ranked with accessibility improvement. So this is major, but here’s the biggest one. 90% boost in authority score for compliant sites.
[00:18:59] And the thing is, when I read people, wow, we’ve been celebrating last Friday because we had a 0.5 increase in our click rates, for example. That’s another one. I’m like, that could be 10% or 15%. I’m happy to see that it now becomes clear that accessibility affects everything.
[00:19:21] And the thing is, people approach or companies approach accessibility from a technical standpoint. Like, what do we have to change technically? But accessibility is about people. It’s the same thing with all these solutions, the overlays, the whatever. They’re trying to approach it as a digital problem. But this is a human-centric problem. This is how people use the web.
[00:19:48] And now if you go back to SEO, one thing I learned a long time ago, I mean you can tell me about Google and other search engines, whatever you want, I don’t care how technical you are, their biggest customer is the people who search on the web, not the ones who pay them to show their stuff. And so this is what search engines are looking for.
[00:20:16] And now with AI, I’m having a blast because I see people writing stuff like, oh, we have to tell the AI to understand our website. But you are leaving your fate in SEO in the hands of something that is going to interpret what you are doing there.
[00:20:36] I’m not going to name the names. It would be unfair because I’m going to confront them with that before. But, there is a massive event that has a fantastic, big website. I find it hard to navigate, but that’s a personal thing. And that is a JavaScript invested monster. And just for fun of it, I just asked AI, can you find this and this and this for me on that page? And AI was like, no, I can’t. It’s rendering JavaScript. I can’t read this. What do you think that does to a screen reader or, because they’re all using the same technology to read it.
[00:21:10]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. When I’ve done podcast episodes about accessibility in the past, we’ve often dwelled not on this side, in fact, I don’t think we’ve ever touched sort of like the SEO and traffic benefit of it. It’s always been from the point of view of, what can you do? As an engineer, as a web developer, what can you do to go in in the weeds and fix things?
[00:21:28] We are just going to brush that aside. You can find that information out. You know, go and talk to Anne, for example, if you want to learn how to do it. But the principle here is more about the SEO and therefore the traffic side of things, on the flip side of doing the work. So you imagine, the work is not done. It’s poorer in terms of SEO and poorer in terms of reach, poorer in terms of search engine ranking, poorer in terms of revenue through your e-commerce platform or what have you. And then if you do do the work, all of those things increase incrementally.
[00:21:59] And in some cases the data shows fairly substantially. And so I’m just going to drill into each of those statistics one at a time because I feel it needs a little bit of like teasing out a little bit. So the first one is, well, there’s many statistics, but the first of the three that I’m going to mention, which you already have mentioned is organic traffic.
[00:22:17] So again, this is making the assumption that the work has been done. You’ve achieved the accessibility goals, presumably, which were many. You’ve jumped through all those hoops and you’ve got this benefit on the other side. And here’s some possible benefits.
[00:22:29] Organic traffic increased by an average of 23% as a site’s accessibility compliance score increased. So can I ask you, is that one directly related to search engines then? Because it feels like it is. You know, you did the accessibility work and a byproduct of that is that you became more visible on search engines. Have I got that right?
[00:22:50]
Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, of course because if assistive technology can’t read your site, the search engines probably can’t either.
[00:22:59]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. It’s kind of interesting though that you get that much of a boost. You’d think if you had improved things, you might see, I don’t know, a few percent here and there, but this figure of 23%. I mean imagine saying that to a marketing person, or the growth person inside of a company, 23% is possible. The word average in that sentence is bolded. So it’s an average of 23%. So presumably there’s a few that are lower and there’s a few that are higher, but an average increase of 23%. So I don’t ever use the phrase win-win.
[00:23:32]
Anne Bovelett:
It is win-win. It’s win-win on sides. Maybe that’s a little bit the dark side in me, but I go to business dinners, meetings, entrepreneur get togethers, blah, blah, blah. And then I always hear, at some point I hear people say, I don’t get it. We are paying our SEO companies so much money, and we are not getting better results. And we have had a redesign on our website. And then I look at their website like, hmm, yeah, sure.
[00:24:01] And then they will fix the site at some point, maybe they will improve the site, where the design goes, where the user flow goes. But still, it’s not ranking better, and still it’s not ranking better. And I wonder when SEO companies are going to become so smart that they’re going to tell their customer, hey customer, stop writing click here everywhere.
[00:24:25]
Nathan Wrigley:
That’s a great, concrete example of what you’re talking about, because I was going to drill into the next one because honestly, the next point does confuse me a little bit. Again, I’ll link to it in the show notes, but point 4, I’ll just read it here, is websites ranked for an average of 27% more organic keywords with a higher accessibility score.
[00:24:45] Can you tease that out for me? Because I’m genuinely puzzled by what that even means. I’m not sure how there’s this overlap between accessibility compliance, and the keywords and how the search engine would pick them up. So that’s me being ignorant.
[00:24:59]
Anne Bovelett:
I would say, set the compliance story on fire. Torch it, and throw it away because compliance is what makes people do the bare minimum. And I think, I know they had to use this term in the report because they’ve been checking it if the site is compliant. And then you will get lulled into a false sense of security when your score says, like Google does in Lighthouse, ooh, you are 97% accessible. And like, yeah, but the 3% that you say it’s not, is what’s blocking about 80% of a group of potential visitors that you are not having.
[00:25:40] But again, it’s about, in my opinion, it’s about the way things have been coded and the way things have been written. For example, what happens is buttons that aren’t buttons that are not really saying, how do you say it? It’s the same thing. It’s the read more thing again. I have to be careful that I don’t go into the rabbit hole here too much. But it’s the read more thing. It is text where links are actually named properly.
[00:26:08] And just to give you an example, I see a lot of people who try to do affiliate marketing. Let’s say food bloggers. They make humongous sites. They love using WordPress. I know that. There are tons of plugins also for food bloggers to play out the, what do you call that in English? The nutritional values of this and that. All right. And then these bloggers, people complain about it like, oh, why do they have to write their life stories and that of the spider in the corner on the ceiling before they give me the recipe? Well, that is because they’re trying to get caught in the search engines, right?
[00:26:44] And then they have all these links. Like, someone creates a great meal with a fantastic expensive pan and a pot, and I don’t know what, and they have all these articles from Amazon. And all they have is click here, click here, click here, click here. And then imagine someone who is using that. I mean I love, I have a nice little, what do you call that, extension in Chrome? I’ve been speaking German all morning. This is why my English is so rusty right now. I have this extension and it just, in a big article, if I want to know, oh, what was that tool that she was using again? I’ll go get the link list with that little extension there, or I’ll just run the screen reader and get the link list, because that’s easy for me to do. And then all I see is click here, click here, click here. So I’m not finding the link through that pan, and so I’m not buying it through her link.
[00:27:35] Affiliate websites could make so much more money if they would just do the right thing in their content. Let’s forget about the code of the theme that they chose, just the content. If that is played out correctly, and it’s not some JavaScript generated hoo-ha, which doesn’t happen in WordPress Core, they would make a lot more money.
[00:27:58]
Nathan Wrigley:
Because I haven’t really been following the SEO industry for a very long time, I really don’t have much intelligence around what search engines these days look for. You know, back in the day when I was building websites, there was a, almost like a playbook that you could go through. And if you did these things, you could achieve reasonable results in SEO.
[00:28:18] And that was the state of the internet 15 years ago when algorithms were less sophisticated, and people were just beginning to kind of get online and use things like Google all the time. But it sounds to me as if we’ve got to a point with search engines, as if they’re able to, I’m maybe going to overstate this, it feels like the more human you have become as a website, the more likely Google will favour you.
[00:28:48] I’m not really encapsulating that very well, but what I mean is, if you put content on there, which is human readable. If you make it obvious where to click to do the thing, rather than stop it with keywords and things which, you know, is not really in the best intentions of humans, that’s clearly done for the algorithm only, it does sound like you are saying that the search engines favour, I’m doing air quotes here, humanity.
[00:29:15]
Anne Bovelett:
They always have. Let me circle back to what I said before. We, as the people who use search engines, and nowadays they’re AI in whatever they do, we are the biggest customer for them. Because if we’re not there to search, to use them, they can’t sell their services to the people paying to be found.
[00:29:37] I might be, how do you say that, unorthodox in this approach, but I’ve seen it. I have a friend, Manuela van Prooijen, she’s the owner of a company called Weblish. In the Netherlands she trains people in how to set up businesses with WordPress and how to build with WordPress. And you wouldn’t expect it when someone is just focused on that, but she’s got a very broad perspective of things. And she dove into SEO in a way that I’ve never seen before. And some of the SEO experts that I know, and we know together, were like, why didn’t we ever think of that? And it had to do with structured data. And of course, everything she builds is accessible.
[00:30:24]
Nathan Wrigley:
Okay, so I’m going to pivot slightly. However, I think we’ve made the case that if you are endeavouring to make your website more accessible, I think by reading that piece, you will understand that there are definite benefits in terms of traffic and search engine rankings and so on. So let’s just take that one as a given.
[00:30:43] And then I’m going to move over to a piece which you yourself wrote, not that long ago actually. Almost exactly a year ago, March 4th, 2025. It’s on your website, annebovelett.eu. It’s called The E-commerce Industry’s Billion Pound Mistake. And in here you make the argument, and you bind it to money, to actual dollar terms and things like that, which is quite interesting.
[00:31:05] So I’m wondering if you’d just paint the numbers around what you were saying here, if you can remember. I know it’s a year ago now that you wrote it. But broadly speaking, what was the economic case that you were making?
[00:31:13]
Anne Bovelett:
It’s actually, this is based on a British report, actually. It’s called the Click Away Pound Report. It was brought in 2019. And that actually measures how much revenue people left lying on the street by not making their shops, their online shops, accessible. And the economic case is, we say in Dutch, you thief your own wallet, if you’re not doing it. And again, these are, this is data, these are numbers.
[00:31:48] So in 2016, for example, the click away pound increased by 45%. Let me just throw around some numbers, right? So in 2016, the money that people left lying on the street by not making their eshops accessible was 11.75 billion. Billion, not million, billion pounds. In 2019, that was already up to 17 billion. Really, I don’t know if they’re going to do another Click Away Pound Report again at some point, but I think we’re going to be shocked. Because since 2019, the state of the internet actually worsened because of all this technology. And it’s getting worse because of all this vibe coding voodoo, where they’re using AI that is trained on inaccessible code. But that’s another thing.
[00:32:45] So there’s another article that I have. I think it is so much money that people leave lying on the street, this is larger than the Chinese economy, that amount. It’s in an article I wrote about e-commerce in 2022, where I was criticising CMSs, including WooCommerce, who actually did a great job. Now WooCommerce Core is now accessible. And said, okay, if your system sucks, the people using your system are going to lose without being able to help it.
[00:33:18]
Nathan Wrigley:
If you send me the link to that piece, I will obviously add that into the show notes.
[00:33:22]
Anne Bovelett:
It seems I’m on the cold side of accessibility because that is something that forever stuck with me. Someone called me cold hearted, because I’m talking about the commercial side of accessibility all the time. But, you know, there was a time, this is maybe a strange segway, but there was a time where I weighed way over a hundred kilos. I was so heavy. I had trouble moving, I was in pain, I was uncomfortable. And for me, buying clothes became an uncomfortable exercise. Going into these shops, especially these nice boutique shops, with their very small cabins, you know, trying to turn around and not being able to step into a pair of pants or whatever. Just uncomfortable.
[00:34:13] But the most uncomfortable thing about it for me was that I got blatantly ignored by the ladies that were selling the clothes in the stores. And three years after that, I had lost about 37 kilos. And I came into that one store where it was very, very apparent that they really weren’t interested in talking to me at all. I came in and they immediately jumped me, both of them, the shop owner and her assistant. And I got madder and madder and madder and madder.
[00:34:49] And at some point I said, you know what? Keep your clothes, just tell me don’t you remember me? Don’t you know who I am? No, we don’t remember you. And I was like, well, here’s the picture. Oh yeah, I’ve seen you before. And you know what, the fact, at that time I was thinking, maybe it’s because you’re too busy or you are, you know, I don’t know. But the fact that you jumped me right now with the same amount of people in the place tells me something else.
[00:35:15] Now, why am I telling this story? This is how a lot of people that need assistive technology feel, and also how older people feel on the web. I mean, I don’t know about the UK, but in the Netherlands, you can’t do your taxes without a couple of apps on a phone. Well, if you jump through a million hoops, maybe you can send it in on paper still, but it’s almost impossible. If apps like that don’t work correctly, you’re putting people’s fate in someone else’s hand, because you’re working with their tax number.
[00:35:54] I don’t know in the UK, in the Netherlands, your personal tax number, never ever give that to someone. Never. Your social security number, don’t do it. And then you’re like, maybe 60, 70-year-old, and you’re right before that stage where the technology’s getting too hard for you, but apps to do these things are too difficult.
[00:36:17] There is a local tax office in the Netherlands that had a full accessibility redesign done by Level Level in Rotterdam. And for them, the support requests went down, I think by 30% or something. I couldn’t find the case on their website anymore.
[00:36:35] But this is because people are being empowered to do things by themselves. That’s what they want. And for example, in Germany, there are statistics about that. This is an article that I actually published today that, I think it says like 90% of all German users will always try to first solve something by themselves, and if it doesn’t work they’ll walk away.
[00:36:58]
Nathan Wrigley:
That’s one of the curious things that come out of the article. The first part of this conversation was all about SEO and what have you. We didn’t really talk much about the person experiencing the problem. It was more about search engines and maybe how you would technically fix things. But this is so interesting. In your piece, you, and I’m just going to quote it because that’s going to be the easiest way to get the information into the record.
[00:37:20] And it says, a shocking 75% of disabled customers have willingly paid more for a product from an accessible website, rather than struggle with a cheaper inaccessible one. And that kind of sums up the whole thing really for me, that if you are faced with a struggle to do something, let’s say, I dont know, you want to buy a widget and it’s $100. The calculus that you are going through is, I could spend an hour and a half trying to get that $100 widget, or I could go to this other website and pay $120 for it and be done in three minutes. Well, that’s obvious, I know which one I’m going to do, which is really interesting.
[00:38:02]
Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, yeah. And there’s another thing. People are always like, oh, accessibility is only for the blind. No. The people that go forgotten in that, and I have to tell you, disabilities rarely come alone, right? I’m just going to take myself as an example. I have ADHD on steroids. I’m in the spectrum. I’m old. I need two pairs of glasses, one for my computer, one for my regular stuff. I’m starting to lose my hearing in certain regions. I am the target group. If I need to go and order, and I’m B2B, right? I’m a business.
[00:38:41] I will order B2B because then I can deduct the VAT. And I have to buy hardware. And I always try to buy the best. I will go to a store, maybe, and it’s B2B and I will go online. If I can’t figure out their stuff, I’m leaving. If I need to look at a manual, a video manual, that has background music while someone is talking, but there is no subtitles, I’m gone. I can’t follow it. My brain won’t let me.
[00:39:15]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, I mean the analogy in my head is kind of, I don’t know, you’re going into a clothes shop or something like that and you need a new pair of shoes or something, and you discover that all the shoes are in a locked cupboard in a corner. And in order to get to the shoes, you need to ask a receptionist for the key. And then they go and find the key, and then they give you the wrong key and the key doesn’t work. And then they don’t point out where the box of shoes is, so you’re completely confused.
[00:39:36] That whole thing is just avoided by going to the next shop along the street where all the shoes are right there for you to pick up and try on and what have you. You’ve made the journey easy, and it turns out that price isn’t necessarily the prime mover here, which is really interesting. I find that statistic fascinating, that people will pay accordingly if they can get what they need out of it. I mean I know it sounds like common sense, but having it painted in those stark colours is.
[00:40:04]
Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, yeah. This is one of the things I did want to mention as well. I have the privilege of talking to Mark Weisbrod a lot from Greyd. You know him? He’s the CEO of Greyd. I think he’s unique, especially in the world of WordPress because he’s looking at things solely from a business perspective. He’s not distracted by technical issues or whatsoever. He will get it from there. He’s someone who often says to me like, okay, I like the story now show me the data.
[00:40:39] But then at some point, I remember it was before the European Accessibility Act was coming into effect, I think. So this, we’re talking about this in 2023 or something. And then I said, I don’t get it. Why is everybody so focused on the European Accessibility Act? Look at how much money they can make by leaving people their dignity. Because that’s basically what it is by making your stuff accessible.
[00:41:06] If you get past the stupid idea that if something is accessible, it can’t look nice. I mean, go to github.com without being logged in, that’s accessible. It’s a wonderful website. And then I said, where is the common sense? Why, if I talk to the C-suite of a company in one of those business things, and I say, listen, if you would make this and this and this more accessible in your web shop, your turn over would go up by so many percent, why are they not like, we’ve got to invest this money right now?
[00:41:39] And then he said, no matter what, people will always think with their wallet today and tomorrow. They’re not thinking about next week. Only the most visionary leaders in the industries think way more. And this is something I say now, because he said, he was telling me about they were selling, in a company he worked for, they were selling solar systems. And these systems would save the buyers so much money on the long run, but it was very hard to sell them because it was in the long run.
[00:42:20] And if a CEO or a CFO, I mean I know it sounds offending, I don’t mean it that way, but in large corporations it’s to eat or to be eaten. Managers are always afraid of their managers kicking down on them and the others kicking up, and they’re always trying to defend their own spot in the business. It’s only in smaller companies that people can have more leverage. So there are always so many powers at play in a company that if you start talking to a company about, it’s for the greater good of your company, it’s the same argument as it’s for the greater good of humanity.
[00:42:59] And I’ll just give you another number for example. Based on the Click Away Pound Report, and some other data that I have, I’ve been working on building a calculator. You tell me which country your web shop is in, you tell me how much turnover you have per year and then that calculator is going to tell you how much potential revenue you are walking away from by not making it accessible. I did this for very, very big supermarket chain in Switzerland, and the outcome was you could make 0.94% more revenue. And then you’re like, yeah, less than 1%. Yeah, sure. Ah, it’s still 350 million Swiss Francs.
[00:43:43]
Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. Less than 1% but still that kind of money, wow.
[00:43:47]
Anne Bovelett:
Yes. And then you get this perspective thing. Because I’m pretty sure the day that this knowledge seeps through to the unions of the employees of this company, the employees are going to go like, why do we have to save money, or why do we not get a raise where you don’t take the opportunity to make that much more turnover? And then someone else with other interests in the company says, yeah, but the stakeholders, you know, or the investors, this is why this is not happening. I mean, we all think common sense is the greatest good in the world. People do not have common sense, period.
[00:44:33]
Nathan Wrigley:
It’s that sort of invisible layer to people who don’t experience any of the accessibility problems that the industry is trying to tackle. For example, you’re fully sighted, you can use your legs and walk about and use a mouse and use regular computer and use a regular screen and your ears are working fine and all those kind of things. All of that stuff is just sort of hidden from you, and so it just somehow doesn’t drive itself to the front of your consciousness.
[00:44:56] Which is why this is so interesting because, although you said you’ve kind of been berated in the accessibility community for banging the gong about money all the time, it’s a great way to cut through, isn’t it? You can go to the CEO of a company and make the economic argument, I would imagine, much more readily than you can do with the moral argument.
[00:45:16]
Anne Bovelett:
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about writing up a profile for a position in companies that I don’t think exists yet. Because normally, we call it the sheep with five legs in Dutch. It’s very hard to find that sheep with five legs. If someone is an accessibility officer in a big company, they are being banged on for compliance. If someone is working on accessibility in a lower rank, they’re getting overworked because people have so many expectations or they just don’t do things.
[00:45:52] It’s always, this person is screaming in the desert like, hey, this is happening. I’ve seen this happen, I was guiding a company with more than I think 13 or 14 development teams, over 85 people, and they didn’t talk to each other. Design, didn’t talk to development, development didn’t talk to development in other areas, because that was how the company was structured.
[00:46:18] And I think people need to be educated in two ways to have this position that doesn’t exist yet. It’s a position where you are able to kick the shins of the C-suite in a professional manner, of course, but also sit down with development, design, and content teams and make them communicate with each other in a way that works.
[00:46:48] And for that, you have to understand these processes. And normally, I’m absolutely not for people in managing positions that know the job that the people they’re managing is doing, because they very often become that, how do you say that, the driver on the carriage running in front of the horses? You know, that’s really dangerous. You shouldn’t interfere into detail level too much.
[00:47:15] But if you understand it on a detail level, from design content and development, you can get these people to talk to each other and help each other. Because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a developer that sees a design and is like, woah, that design, the way that is made, that’s going to cause some accessibility issues. Those are issues.
[00:47:39] And normally they will just, no, no, I was asked to develop this. I’ll develop it. Instead, you need to raise a culture where people go to the designer and say, hey, I noticed this. What is your thought behind this? And they can’t. And if they had a middle person for that where they could go to and say, look, I got this, I’m not sure about it, then you would have a fantastic flow in a company to make things accessible.
[00:48:06] Because this goes through so much more. So an article that I published today is about how much money you lose in support. It’s the same thing. If a support, people doing support are not used to really listen and someone says, I’m hard of hearing, or someone says, I have dyslexia. When you’re saying, yeah, go read it, it’s on that page on our website. If this person calls you because he couldn’t find, or understand the page, and then you force this person into vulnerability by admitting that he or she has dyslexia. And that is going to leave a very bad taste in someone’s mouth. And what happens? They’re going to walk away. If you’re not some government thing that everybody needs like, I don’t know, taxes, because otherwise they’ll come and rob you.
[00:48:54]
Nathan Wrigley:
It is genuinely so interesting because a lot of the content that I’ve made in the past has been definitely about the ways to fix your website. So here’s the WCAG guidelines, go figure. This episode’s been really entirely different.
[00:49:07] So first of all, looking at Semrush, and the data. Just sort of painting the picture of the improvements that you can get in terms of traffic and visibility across search engines should you go down the accessibility route. But also then getting into the financial bit, which it sounds like is your thing.
[00:49:27] So I think that’s hopefully of interest to some people who perhaps have just always thought about accessibility as a, I’m a web developer, there’s another job that I’ve got to do. Well, now you’re kind of armoured with things that you could maybe even approach clients with. You know, you’ve got a website, we haven’t looked at it in a few years, you are always looking for ways to make more revenue out of your website. Well, look, I’ve got this thing in my back pocket. This is a really credible way that we can do some tweaks. I know what I need to do. There’s guidelines that I can follow. Let’s do that and see if we can improve the revenue.
[00:50:00] I think we’ve probably covered that. And so with that in mind, Anne, just before we end, I’m going to try and link to the piece that you mentioned. I’ll certainly, anything that we’ve mentioned in this podcast, I’ll try and link to in the show notes on WP Tavern. Do you just want to tell us where we can find you? I did reference your website at one point during the podcast, but do you just want to give us that again, or maybe social networks or something like that where you hang out?
[00:50:23]
Anne Bovelett:
If you remember how to spell my name, just put it in Google, you’ll find me everywhere. Okay. No. So it’s Anne and then Bovelett, which is B from Bernard, B-O-V-E-L-E-T-T. You can find me on LinkedIn a lot. I’m there a lot because I talk shop a lot.
[00:50:44] Very active on X, Twitter. So that’s where you find me. And don’t be afraid to approach me. Just, if you send me LinkedIn DMs, it can take a while because sometimes I get too many, and then I’m overwhelmed and, yeah. But the best thing is to send me an email. Just go to the contact page on my website.
[00:51:06]
Nathan Wrigley:
All that it remains for me to do is to say, Anne Bovelett, thank you for chatting to me today. That was really interesting. Thank you so much.
[00:51:12]
Anne Bovelett:
Thank you for having me and giving me the platform.
[00:51:13]
Nathan Wrigley:
You are very welcome.
On the podcast today we have
Anne Bovelett
Anne is a seasoned accessibility strategist with many years of experience in the tech industry. Her journey into accessible design began several years ago, and since then she’s become a passionate advocate for making the web a more inclusive place, especially for WordPress users and developers. Drawing from her background in consulting, training, and her own experiences, Anne’s work focuses on the intersection of accessibility, universal design, and tangible business outcomes.
This episode explores accessibility, not just as a moral imperative, but as a strategic advantage for website owners and businesses. Anne explains how neglecting accessibility means you’re leaving serious money on the table, referencing compelling research from a variety of credible sources. These studies reveal practical data. Compliant sites enjoy increases in organic traffic, a boost in keyword rankings, stronger authority, and significant financial opportunities, sometimes running into millions and even billions.
Anne talks about why accessibility hasn’t always been prioritised on the web, using analogies of the physical world and the history of web development. She gets into the technical side as well, but this conversation is specifically geared toward the real-world, bottom-line business benefits of accessible websites, reach more users, boost revenue, and even reduce support costs.
If you’re a website owner, developer, or digital business leader who’s ever wondered whether accessibility work is ‘worth it’ this episode is for you.
Useful links
Semrush
Accessibility Checker website
Manuela van Prooijen’s
Weblish
The e-commerce industry’s billion-pound mistake
Click-Away Pound Report
Anne on LinkedIn
Anne on X
by Nathan Wrigley at April 15, 2026 02:00 PM
Open Channels FM
The Imperative of Layered Security in Modern Web Hosting
Cybersecurity in web hosting is increasingly complex, requiring a layered security approach. Diverse threats demand specialized defenses, with ongoing challenges balancing protection and usability against evolving AI-driven attacks.
by Bob Dunn at April 15, 2026 01:01 PM
Open Channels FM
Keeping It Open
In this episode, Bob Dunn introduces “Keep It Open,” a new initiative designed to support the independence and sustainability of the network. Bob Dunn explains why maintaining honest conversations and championing the open web matters, and invites listeners, whether makers, developers, technologists, or agencies to join as fellow believers in this mission. Unlike traditional memberships, […]
by Bob Dunn at April 15, 2026 10:37 AM
April 14, 2026
Open Channels FM
Lessons from Two Decades of Open Source and the Social Internet
In this episode, host Matthias Pfefferle chats with software engineer Will Norris, discussing his extensive contributions to open standards, federated identity, and open source, particularly within the WordPress ecosystem and the evolution of decentralized social networking.
by Bob Dunn at April 14, 2026 09:21 AM
April 13, 2026
Riad Benguella
Meet Studio Code: I redesigned my WordPress site in 2 hours
The shoemaker’s children go barefoot
or, as we say in French,
Les cordonniers sont toujours les plus mal chaussés.
That’s been me for years. As a developer working on WordPress, I’ve long neglected the design of my site. This ends today.
We’ve recently released a new tool called
Studio Code
, think of it as Claude Code but tailored for WordPress. A tool you can install by running
npm -g install wp-studio
and invoke using
studio code
locally. Or you can try directly using
npx wp-studio code
. I took this as an opportunity to see what it’s capable of, and oh boy! I’m mind-blown 🤯
It took me:
1 tiny prompt to pull the site locally
1 main redesign prompt and 3 or 4 follow-up prompts to get everything redesigned and sorted out.
1 last tiny prompt to push the site online
The whole process lasted about a couple of hours during the weekend, while watching yet another
Sinner-Alcaraz
match on TV.
(Ok, I’m lying a bit. The push didn’t work the first time because I had discovered a bug that had since been fixed.)
There are a lot of things that made the experience so enjoyable for me. I can see myself switching how I work with WordPress sites entirely to this process:
All it took to get access to all my remote sites was to login to
WP.com
prompted by the tool itself.
I didn’t have to think much or configure anything. I didn’t have to install any MCP, or provide any specific instructions. It just worked.
I really enjoyed the feeling of freedom it gives you to iterate on your designs, content, and explore wild ideas. It feels like everything is possible, your ideas are the limit.
I really enjoyed the safety net of the local development. I can change anything, break whatever I want, yet it’s still local and won’t impact my live site until I decide.
I literally just said “push my site back to riad.blog” and that was it.
Nonetheless, the tool still has some rough edges, but we’re shipping early and iterating fast. We want you to test it and please share any feedback you have with us. We have a lot of ideas and you can also bring your own, it’s all
Open Source
I forgot, what do you think about my new design? I wanted something minimal but gives you a small “hacker” feeling. Don’t be too harsh on me.
by Riad Benguella at April 13, 2026 03:48 PM
Open Channels FM
Collaborative Publishing in Modern WordPress
Real-time collaboration in WordPress enhances team efficiency by allowing simultaneous editing, though initial limitations exist. Future improvements aim for smoother, scalable experiences.
by Bob Dunn at April 13, 2026 12:15 PM
April 12, 2026
Donncha
Media Picker for Immich: Self-Hosted Photos in WordPress
I’ve just released Media Picker for Immich on the WordPress.org plugin directory. It connects WordPress to a self-hosted
Immich
server so you can browse, search, and insert your photos and videos into posts without copying files around.
Immich
I run Immich at home. It’s where my photos now live. They’re organised, searchable, with facial recognition and AI search. My WordPress uploads directory is where photos used to go, and the two never talked to each other. This plugin fixes that.
How it works
Point the plugin at your Immich server and give it an API key. You can set a site-wide key or let each user configure their own to connect to their own Immich account.
If the site-wide key is blank, each user adds their own key on their profile page. All Immich API calls happen server-side.
Two ways to add media
Once configured, an Immich tab appears in two places.
The first is the Media Library grid. Switch to the Immich view and you can search, filter by person, and either Use or Copy assets into WordPress.
Use
creates a virtual attachment. Nothing is copied; WordPress proxies the media from Immich on demand and caches it locally on first request. Your uploads directory stays lean.
Copy
downloads the original file into wp-content/uploads/ as a normal attachment.
The same tab shows up in the “Select or Upload Media” dialog inside the post editor, so you can pull an Immich photo straight into a post without leaving the editor.
A few details worth mentioning
Videos work too. Proxied videos stream with seek support.
Lightbox. Proxied Immich images in posts open a full-resolution lightbox on click.
Local cache. Proxied media is cached to wp-content/cache/immich/ after the first fetch. Optional cleanup with a configurable lifetime.
Your server stays private. Immich only needs to be reachable from WordPress — not from the public internet. Visitors never connect to Immich directly.
When images are copied over, virtually or otherwise, you can insert them into a post like any other image, which also includes adding them to galleries in posts.
Get it
Install it from the
WordPress plugin directory
or search for “media picker for Immich” in the plugins page in WordPress.
Feedback and bug reports are welcome. Development is done on GitHub
here
#Immich #WordPress #WordPressplugin
by Donncha at April 12, 2026 06:07 PM
April 11, 2026
WordPress.org blog
Celebrating Community at WordCamp Asia 2026
WordCamp Asia 2026 brought the global WordPress community to Mumbai, India, from April 9–11, gathering contributors, organizers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees at the Jio World Convention Centre for three days of learning, collaboration, and community. With 2,627 attendees, the event reflected the scale of the WordPress community and the strong turnout throughout the event.
The event unfolded across Contributor Day and two conference days, with a program that moved from technical sessions and workshops to hallway conversations, shared meals, and joyful moments of connection across the venue. From first-time attendees to longtime contributors, WordCamp Asia 2026 reflected the breadth of the WordPress ecosystem and the many ways people shaped and sustained it.
WordPress is not a company. It is a shared commitment to keeping the web open.
Mary Hubbard, Executive Director, WordPress
Throughout the event, WordCamp Asia 2026 balanced formal programming with the conversations happening around it. Sessions and workshops set the pace, while morning networking, tea breaks, lunch, the family photo, the sponsor’s raffle, and the after party in Jasmine Hall helped make the event feel welcoming, social, and connected.
How WordCamp Asia 2026 Took Shape
Bringing together contribution, practical learning, and forward-looking conversation in one shared program. Across Contributor Day and the conference sessions that followed, attendees moved between hands-on work, technical talks, workshops, and broader discussions about AI, education, enterprise, community growth, and the open web.
The result was a WordCamp that felt expansive without losing its sense of connection. Different rooms with topics as themes, helping different audiences, and different forms of participation all fed into the same larger picture: a community actively building what comes next for WordPress as a feeling that something bigger was happening: not just a schedule being delivered, but a community showing up for one another and for the future of WordPress.
Contributor Day: Building WordPress Together
Contributor Day opened WordCamp Asia 2026 with one of the clearest expressions of what makes the project special: people coming together to move WordPress forward by working on it. More than 1,500 participants joined 38 table leads across more than 20 contribution tables, creating a day that was expansive in scale and grounded in real work. For some, it was a return to familiar teams and longtime collaborators. For others, it was the beginning of their contributor journey.
The day moved between structured learning and hands-on participation. Alongside contributor sessions, attendees joined workshops, visited the
Open Source Library
, took part in
YouthCamp
, and attended
The Making of a WordPress Release: Conversations with Past Release Squad Members
, a featured panel that added depth and perspective to the work of building and sustaining WordPress.
What made Contributor Day stand out was not only the number of people in the room, but the range of ways they could take part. Workshops created space for skill-building. YouthCamp brought younger participants into the experience and widened the event’s reach in a meaningful way. The day felt welcoming, energetic, and full of possibility.
By the end, the impact was already visible across teams. Polyglots contributors suggested more than 7,000 strings and reviewed 3,200 of them. Photo contributors uploaded 76 images. The Test team worked on more than 20 tickets, and 55 contributors joined Training. Those numbers told only part of the story, but they pointed to what Contributor Day continued to do so well: turn a large gathering into shared work that strengthened the project in real time.
Conference Sessions Take Shape
Across the conference days, WordCamp Asia 2026 covered a wide range of topics, from technical development and hands-on workshops to business strategy and the open web. Sessions took place across the Foundation, Growth, and Enterprise tracks, with workshops running alongside the main program.
One of the opening sessions was James LePage’s
WordPress and AI
, which introduced a theme that appeared throughout the conference: how WordPress is responding to changes in AI, publishing, and developer workflows. That topic continued in later sessions focused on AI-driven development, autonomous testing, plugin maintenance, and automation.
Later that morning, a fireside chat with Mary Hubbard and Shilpa Shah shifted the focus toward trust, security, and the longer-term questions shaping open source publishing. Coming early in the program, the conversation gave the conference an important center of gravity, pairing technical change with questions of stewardship, resilience, and what people needed from WordPress as the web continued to evolve. Rather than pulling away from the event’s technical momentum, it deepened it, bringing a human perspective to the pace of change and reminding the audience that progress in open source is not only about what gets built, but about how communities guide, challenge, and sustain that work over time.
From there, the conference widened into a program that balanced developer-focused talks with sessions on the
Interactivity API
, the
HTML API
AI-driven development workflows
education initiatives
observability
automation
, and
startup strategy
. On the final day, those threads continued through talks on
WP translation
community building
WordPress Playground
data engineering
enterprise WordPress
, and
journalism on the open web
Together, the two conference days made clear that WordCamp Asia 2026 was designed not for one kind of attendee, but for many. Developers, founders, marketers, contributors, organizers, and people finding their place in WordPress for the first time all found something that spoke directly to their work and interests. The breadth of the program was striking, but so was the feeling that these conversations mattered now.
Building What Comes Next
WordCamp Asia 2026 closed with reflections from Mary Hubbard, following an opening announcement from Chenda Ngak that WordCamp India will join the calendar in 2027 as the fourth flagship WordPress event.
Mary’s remarks tied together several threads that had already surfaced throughout the event: India’s long-standing role in the WordPress project, the growth of programs like Campus Connect and WordPress Credits, the energy of YouthCamp, and the significance of WordPress 7.0. One of the clearest ideas in the session was that WordPress is entering a new phase shaped by real-time collaboration, AI infrastructure, and global contributor growth. That framing gave the closing session a strong sense of direction without losing sight of the community work that made it possible.
The session then shifted into a panel discussion about the current state of WordPress and where the project is headed next. Peter Wilson and Sergey Biryukov joined Hubbard on stage, while audience questions brought the conversation back to many of the themes that had shaped the event across all three days. Even from afar, Ma.tt Mullenweg remained part of the discussion, following along remotely and sending written responses during the live Q&A.
Those questions touched on contributor growth, AI, plugins, local communities, product direction, and the long-term health of the open web. What stood out was how often the answers returned to the same core idea: WordPress continues to grow through open discussion, shared responsibility, and the people who keep showing up to build it together.
A Lasting Momentum
Over three days in Mumbai, WordCamp Asia 2026 brought together contribution, learning, and community. From Contributor Day through the closing keynote, the event balanced hands-on work with bigger conversations about publishing, technology, education, and the open web.
The event also created space for many kinds of participation. Some attendees contributed to Core, Training, Polyglots, Photos, and other teams. Others came for the conference program, workshops, or the chance to reconnect with collaborators and meet new people. Across session rooms, tea breaks, shared meals, sponsor hall conversations, and the after party, the community side of the event remained just as important as the formal program.
Thank you to the organizers, volunteers, speakers, sponsors, attendees, and everyone who joined online. WordCamp Asia 2026 was a reminder that WordPress continues to grow through the people who show up to contribute and build together.
There is still more to look forward to this year. The community will gather again at
WordCamp Europe 2026 in Kraków, Poland
from June 4–6, followed by
WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona
from August 16–19.
by Brett McSherry at April 11, 2026 06:21 PM
April 10, 2026
Open Channels FM
How AI Is Reshaping Release Communication in Open Source Projects
AI is revolutionizing release communication for open source projects by automating updates, enhancing clarity, and maintaining human oversight, ensuring effective information delivery.
by Bob Dunn at April 10, 2026 08:47 AM
Gary
Claudaborative Editing 0.4: Twice the fun!
I’ve been taking an iterative approach to building Claudaborative Editing: build something to prove that the underlying concept works, then evolve on top of that. The first two iterations were answering a question I had:
can an LLM genuinely improve the writing process
? Along the way, I found a more important question:
can it be done without contributing to the masses of generated slop we see
Having seen the underlying idea working, I needed to answer the next question: can it be brought into the actual writing environment? Can it be useful, but keep out of the way?
Can you talk to an LLM from within WordPress, and have it talk back? I think I’m onto something, and it’s
alot
of fun.
Coming to a WordPress Near You
Naturally, the next step was to build a WordPress plugin that provided a straightforward interface to the LLM backend. You still install the tool to run with your local copy of Claude Code, but once it’s running, you can do everything directly from the block editor. The plugin is waiting to be approved for the WordPress.org plugin directory, but you can
download it directly from the GitHub repo now
Tools are easily accessible when you need them, but otherwise stay out of your way. You choose how much input you want the LLM to have in your writing: it can fix things up for you, or you can ask it to just leave notes and you’ll decide how you want to proceed. Personally, I prefer to do the work myself, but everyone can choose their level of comfort.
That said, one of the things I often forget to do when writing a post is to tag it properly. If I do remember, I’m never sure what to tag it with. By the time I get to publishing, I’m impatient just to get it out in the world! So, now there’s a button that’ll give suggestions right before publishing, letting you pick and choose which suggestions to use, and what to drop.
Planning is a Conversation
I always start Claude Code in planning mode, and I wanted that for posts, too. That’s where I started this post, and I can absolutely see myself using this every time I need to write a post. Not to do the writing for me, but to help me organise my thoughts. I opened the Compose mode in the sidebar, I had it summarise the changes that I’ve made in the last 2 weeks, and present a few options for how to collate them. Some I kept, some I dropped.
In a lot of ways, it’s more like a very advanced
ELIZA
, though rather than just reflecting your words back, it reflects your ideas back in a more structured form.
What’s next
I’ll be honest, I’m really happy with how this has turned out so far! I’d love to hear your feedback as you use it. What would you like to see here? I’ve already noted down a bunch of ideas that came up just while I was writing this post, so there are definitely more things to come!
Go ahead and give it a shot now:
npx claudaborative-editing start
by Gary at April 10, 2026 05:40 AM
April 09, 2026
Open Channels FM
How Hosting Companies Empower Agencies Through Effective Partnerships
In this episode, Adam Weeks and Carrie Smaha discuss agency partner programs, emphasizing ongoing commissions, risk management, and building trust.
by Bob Dunn at April 09, 2026 10:33 AM
Greg Ziółkowski
Research: Architecting Tools for AI Agents at Scale
Loading all available tools into an LLM’s context simultaneously is one of the most consequential architectural mistakes teams make when building AI integrations. The solution isn’t bigger context windows, and it’s progressive tool exposure: dynamically presenting only the tools relevant to each interaction. This post surveys the major patterns for doing so, drawn from production servers, […]
by Greg Ziółkowski at April 09, 2026 05:04 AM
April 08, 2026
Weston Ruter
Adding an MCP Server to the WordPress Core Development Environment
I wanted to hook up Claude Code to be able to interact with my local
wordpress-develop
core development environment via MCP (Model Context Protocol). I couldn’t find documentation specifically for doing this, so I’m sharing how I did it here.
Assuming you have
set up the environment
(with Docker) and started it via
npm run env:start
1. Install & Activate the MCP Adapter plugin
The MCP adapter is not currently available as a plugin to install from the plugin directory. You instead have to obtain it from GitHub and
install
it from the command line. I
installed it as a plugin
instead of as a Composer package:
cd src/wp-content/plugins
git clone https://github.com/WordPress/mcp-adapter
cd mcp-adapter
composer install
Next, activate the plugin. Naturally, you can also just activate the “MCP Adapter” plugin from the WP admin. You can also activate it via WP-CLI (but from the project root working directory, since you can’t run this command from inside of the
mcp-adapter
directory:
npm run env:cli -- plugin activate mcp-adapter
2. Register the MCP server with Claude
Here’s the command I used to register the
wordpress-develop
MCP server with Claude:
claude mcp add-json wordpress-develop --scope user '{"command":"npm", "args":["--prefix", "~/repos/wordpress-develop/", "run", "env:cli", "--", "mcp-adapter", "serve", "--server=mcp-adapter-default-server", "--user=admin"]}'
Here’s the JSON with formatting:
"command"
"npm"
"args"
: [
"--prefix"
"~/repos/wordpress-develop/"
"run"
"env:cli"
"--"
"mcp-adapter"
"serve"
"--server=mcp-adapter-default-server"
"--user=admin"
You may want to remove
--scope user
if you just want to register the MCP server for the one project. I tend to re-use the same WP environment for multiple projects (core and plugins), so I think it may make it easier for me to install at the user level instead.
You will also need to change the
--prefix
arg’s
~/repos/wordpress-develop/
value to correspond to where the repo is actually cloned on your system. I include this arg here so that when I start
claude
inside of a plugin project (e.g. inside
src/wp-content/plugins/performance
), it is able to successfully run the
npm
command in the
package.json
in the ancestor directory. You can remove this
--prefix
arg if this is not relevant to you.
Change the user from
admin
according to your needs.
3. Expose all abilities to MCP
Registered abilities are not exposed to MCP by default. This is a safety measure so that AI agents have to be explicitly allowed to perform potentially sensitive actions. So without any plugins active other than the MCP Adapter, prompting Claude with “discover abilities” results in:
No abilities found. The MCP server connection may be unstable. Try reconnecting again with
/mcp
However, since this is a local development environment, there is no concern about this (for me at least). To opt in all abilities to be exposed to MCP by default, you can use the following plugin code:
add_filter(
'wp_register_ability_args'
static
function
( array $args, string $ability_id )
array
if
// Prevent exposing abilities in MCP except on a local dev environment.
wp_get_environment_type() ===
'local'
&&
// Omit abilities which the MCP Adapter already makes available itself.
! str_starts_with( $ability_id,
'mcp-adapter/'
) {
$args[
'meta'
][
'mcp'
][
'public'
] =
true
return
$args;
},
10
);
This is also available in a
gist
to facilitate installation via
Git Updater
Note: This filter does not currently apply if your ability is registered by extending
Abstract_Ability
in the AI plugin.
At this point, I can now open Claude (or re-connect to the MCP server) and see that it is able to see all (er, most) abilities that are registered on my wordpress-develop env with the same prompt “discover abilities”:
3 WordPress abilities
available:
core/get-environment-info
— Returns runtime context (PHP, database, WordPress version) with the ability name.
core/get-site-info
— Returns site information (all fields or filtered subset)
core/get-user-info
— Returns current user profile details
When I prompt “what’s the environment info?” it executes the
core/get-environment-info
ability via MCP and prints out:
Environment
: local
PHP Version
: 8.3.26
Database Server
: 8.4.8 (MySQL)
WordPress Version
: 7.1-alpha-62161-src
Now the environment just needs more abilities! I’ve filed a Performance Lab
issue
for us at the Core Performance table to work on adding abilities during
Contributor Day
at
WordCamp Asia
tomorrow.
Where I’ve shared this:
Bluesky
Threads
Mastodon
The post
Adding an MCP Server to the WordPress Core Development Environment
appeared first on
Weston Ruter
by Weston Ruter at April 08, 2026 06:41 PM
Open Channels FM
IndieWeb: Protocol or Philosophy?
Matthias Pfefferle and Ryan Barrett discuss the Indie Web's dual nature as both a philosophy and a protocol, emphasizing website ownership and the role of open standards like RSS.
by Bob Dunn at April 08, 2026 12:27 PM
Open Channels FM
The Evergreen Platform
In this episode, Adam Weeks discusses a partnership between Servebolt and Crowd Favorite, focusing on innovative enterprise solutions. The partnership aims to address complex technological challenges, enabling businesses to prioritize growth over maintenance.
by Bob Dunn at April 08, 2026 09:00 AM
April 07, 2026
WordPress.org blog
How to Watch WordCamp Asia 2026 Live
WordCamp Asia 2026 will be available to watch live across three days of streaming, making it easy for the global WordPress community to follow along from anywhere. This year’s live streamed programming begins with a special Contributor Day broadcast, followed by two full conference days of presentations from across the WordPress community.
This post gathers each official stream in one place so you can quickly find the right broadcast for each day. Bookmark this page and return throughout the event to watch live.
Day One: The Making of a WordPress Release
Go behind the scenes of a WordPress release in this special Contributor Day live stream from WordCamp Asia 2026. Past release squad members come together to share stories, reflect on their experience, and talk about what it takes to bring a WordPress release to life. The Panel will go live at
4:30 am UTC
Day Two: Conference Livestreams
Watch the second day of WordCamp Asia 2026 live for a full day of presentations and sessions. beginning at
4:00 am UTC
, including a Fireside chat with Mary Hubbard, which will begin at
5:00 am UTC
over on the Growth Stream.
Foundation
Growth
Enterprise
Day Three: Conference Livestreams
Watch the third day and final day of WordCamp Asia 2026 live, beginning at
4:00 am UTC
for another full day of presentations from across the community. Don’t forget to watch Ma.tt Mullenweg give the final keynote, which will begin on the Growth stream at
10:00 am UTC
Foundation
Growth
Enterprise
You can also explore the
full schedule
to see what is coming up across the event and plan your viewing. However you join, we hope you will follow along and be part of WordCamp Asia 2026.
by Brett McSherry at April 07, 2026 01:57 PM
Open Channels FM
Professionalizing Pricing Models for Open Source CMS Businesses
In this episode, Anne Bovelett chats with Dr. Christian Kurze discuss strategies for startups in open source CMS, emphasizing structured sales and sustainable monetization.
by Bob Dunn at April 07, 2026 09:05 AM
Gary
The Human in the Loop
If you’ve been paying attention to LLM-based coding tools in the past few months, you’ll have seen a seismic shift in how they’re being used. Even 12 months ago, they were little more than glorified auto-complete tools: useful for quickly repeating patterns, but terrible at producing well structured, thoughtful, maintainable code. More recently, however, there seems to have been a new equilibrium reached, where an experienced engineer can guide these tools to consistently produce high quality code. Small course adjustments seem to have an outsized effect, resulting in the “Human in the Loop” paradigm that’s become so popular.
Why It Works
“Code is Poetry” has been my approach to writing code for as long as I can remember. Software is a form of expression, and the way you create that expression is through code. So, to make beautiful software, you need to write beautiful code. But, what happens when you don’t need to write code to create the software?
Suddenly, the code becomes entirely about outcomes. It needs to be correct, functional, and maintainable, but it doesn’t need to be seen as a form of expression itself. Instead, the creative decisions move further up the stack, to the architectural level. You can write beautiful software by writing thoughtful specifications, instead.
That’s not to say that technical abilities are suddenly obsolete. You still need to know what’s possible and realistic to be able to tell the LLM what to build, and to redirect it when it goes in a different direction. You need to be able to read and comprehend the code, you just don’t need to memorise every function signature.
The Temptation
So, if an LLM can write code for me, what else can it do? Marketing copy? Emails? Opinion blog posts? I could ask Claude to write 10 paragraphs on the “The Human in the Loop”, but would you have even read this far if you thought this post was LLM generated? Of course not! I can promise you that every word of this post (and every other post on my blog) was written by me.
Respect for the Reader
If I want you to read this post, and seriously consider the arguments I’m making, the least I can do is write it myself. It goes beyond that, however. LLMs can write functional code, but they can’t write beautiful software. When the text
is
the creative act, there’s no way for the LLM to write the text without compromising your creativity. If you’re the Human in the Loop for a blog post, you’re not injecting your voice, your perspective, or your personality into the post: you’re rubber stamping whatever feels good enough, and that’s a very low bar to clear.
“Good enough” isn’t actually good enough.
A measure of the complexity of a written piece of text is called “perplexity”. It measures the randomness of how the text flows, and it’s probably the thing you’re noticing when you know you’re reading LLM-generated text, but you can’t quite articulate why. It’s an uncanny valley thing: it looks like writing, it reads like writing, it might even flow like writing, but the vibes are off.
The good news is, you’re not going insane, recent research shows that
there is a measurable difference between human written text, and LLM generated text
. LLM generated text is inherently less random, which makes sense when you remember that LLMs are, at their core, giant statistical models that are really good at figuring out “what’s the most likely bit of text to come next”.
The LLM as the Assistant
That’s not to say that LLMs are completely useless when it comes to writing, but we need to use them the right way. While they shouldn’t be generating text, they can absolutely be used to help you write. Over the last month or so, I’ve been working on
Claudaborative Editing
, an experiment to see exactly how much they can help with the writing process. I’ve been building it directly into the WordPress editor, allowing me to plan, write, review, and publish this post from the one place. An LLM assisted, but
every word of it was written by me alone
. My goal isn’t to replace the author, or to make it easier to fill the web with LLM-generated dreck, it’s to help me (and hopefully you, too!) improve your writing, while still keeping it fundamentally yours.
Where Does Creativity Live?
When you’re evaluating these tools, “can an LLM do this?” isn’t the question you need to ask. Instead, think about where the creative part of the process lives. For software, that’s in the design decisions and the architecture, the final product is the expression of that creativity. The specifics of the implementation don’t really matter. For a blog post, or any writing for that matter, the creativity lives in the act of writing. To delegate that to an LLM is to delegate your own creativity.
Here’s what I believe: the best uses of LLM tools are when they augment humans, rather than try to replace them. They enhance the inherent creativity of their human operator, they don’t suppress it.
This belief guides how I use LLMs, and how I build tools that help others use LLMs, too. I’ll be pushing out a new release of Claudaborative Editing in the next few days, I hope you’ll give it a go!
by Gary at April 07, 2026 06:38 AM
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April 24, 2026 10:30 AM
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