In this conversation, Jessica Lyschik shares her journey as a WordPress developer and core contributor, discussing her experiences in the WordPress community, the evolution of WordPress themes, and the unique features of the Greyd.Suite. She emphasizes the importance of full site editing, the challenges of the block editor, and the future of Gutenberg. The discussion also touches on the impact of social media on blogging and concludes with where to find Jessica online.
- Jessica on X: https://x.com/jessicalyschik
- Jessica on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jessicalyschik.com
- Greyd.Suite & Theme: https://greyd.io/
- TwentyTwentyFour Theme: https://wordpress.org/themes/twentytwentyfour/
Transcript is AI-Generated and may include minor inaccuracies.
Brian (00:00)
Hey Jessica, welcome and thanks for joining me.
Jessica Lyschik (00:02)
Hey, thanks for having me, thank you.
Brian (00:04)
Yeah, it’s good to see you again. Maybe for people who don’t know you, although I feel like that’s as many people these days, you give a background kind of of like, you know, where you work, what you do, how you got into WordPress, that sort of thing?
Jessica Lyschik (00:18)
Yeah, of course. So my name is Jessica Lischek. I am a WordPress developer, core contributor, jack of all trades, master of some probably. I think we can talk about this a bit later on what I actually do in this whole WordPress world. I joined the WordPress community about 10 years ago when I attended my first WordCamp and I’ve been following those.
a of folks on Twitter for a while and was like, hmm, there’s an event. Okay, let’s go there. I did not know anyone except for following few people online. And then it just, I was met with so much like, so I felt so welcome there to be there, even if I was a total nobody. And yeah, it kind of sticked. So I sticked around and attended more work camps, joined the local meetup and then step by step.
When the job opportunity came to move into a WordPress agency, just like I took that opportunity and from there on, I’ve been around basically. So I’ve been doing mostly community work in my first couple of years. So like helping with meetups and work camps as an volunteer speaker, later on also organizer.
And I’ve always worked as a web developer. my original background, like my first 10 years that I worked as a web developer were at another company that
I had a ERP system basically and I was in the department for the web development and I was actually working with Python back in the day. So very old school, very old school Python, nothing of the new fancy stuff. But yeah, Python was my first language that I really got into as a backend language. But I’ve always been much of a fan of the front end, be honest. So HTML, CSS, JavaScript was always my kind of vibe.
Brian (01:56)
Okay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Jessica Lyschik (02:16)
And yeah, the switch to WordPress wasn’t that hard because I’ve been using WordPress since 2005 or 2006, that long ago. And yeah, that was pretty easy moving over and getting more into
Brian (02:16)
Uh-huh.
Dang. Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (02:33)
like bigger projects than just a hobby website basically. So I joined a site or imp site as they were previously called at first for about four years, four and a half years, something like that. And yeah, then I worked at a smaller agency. Then I took a little break, like a sabbatical like break, but I was still around basically in the community, but not like having actual work at the time. Then I joined Xtendify and now after one year,
Brian (02:40)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (03:01)
It has been one year anniversary for me, the picking of November. I joined Greyd a year ago. So yeah.
Brian (03:07)
So you’ve kind of done like a little bit of everything. It’s funny that you said you gravitated towards front end, because I feel like a lot of people might remember you as being one of the developers on the 2023 theme, which was kind of the big WordPress theme. Wait, 2024. yeah, because this year is the 2025 theme at the end of 2024. that is, yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, like a new theme coming out for next year.
Jessica Lyschik (03:19)
the four one. Yes.
Five theme, exactly.
It’s always been confusing, I know.
For the next year, exactly.
Brian (03:35)
I guess I never really thought about that. one of the things that, you know, I thought we both have in common is we’ve both done the speed build challenge for Jamie different word camps. And then did you just do one in the last few weeks?
Jessica Lyschik (03:48)
Just last week in Rome at the Core Days, there was a little event organized by the Italian community. They called it Core Days. was not like a traditional work camp. I mean, it still had tracks and such, but it was much more focused on like… So there was no SEO talks or no business talks or whatever. It was purely like technical talks. Some, I think, I don’t think it was workshops, but there was like a bar camp style session slot.
And also a speed build challenge actually. And this was kind of last minute for me. So I did not originally plan to go, but I was like, hmm, Cordes, that sounds interesting. It’s a different kind of word cam. So yeah, should I go? Yeah, let’s go. If, if tickets are still available, why not? And then Jamie saw me on the attendee list and was like reaching out saying, hey, I still need someone for the speed build. And I was like, well, okay.
Brian (04:22)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (04:44)
I can do that, but the thing is I don’t want to push myself forward to like, I have to do this. I would rather see more people doing it just like you did at WorkMBS. But I said, okay, if you do not find someone else, then I will do it. That’s okay.
Brian (04:51)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I’m really jealous of Europe because it seems like you have a lot more word camps and just events, even just fun, you know, conferences and things like that. just, on the West Coast of the US, we really just don’t have that. Although I think PressConf is coming back next year, which will be like a big one. But yeah, you guys have so many fun conferences. When you did the speed build, use the Greyd suite?
Jessica Lyschik (05:26)
No, actually not. I thought about doing so, but Jamie presented us with the WordPress.org website and I was like, okay, I guess there’s not much need for anything else. So I just stick with the 2024 theme and just build it from there actually. But I was wanted to do it, but maybe I should do a speed build challenge on my own YouTube channel somewhere soon.
Brian (05:50)
Yeah. Yeah, so maybe you could explain, cause Greyd is interesting cause it’s a product company, right? But you’re also an agency or is there less agency work now?
Jessica Lyschik (06:03)
Let’s say it’s mixed, to be honest. So we do have the product and we do focus on the product, but we do have some projects that are like lighthouse projects, basically bigger and need more attention than the people we usually sell our product to. So these are other agencies that we work with and they use our product to improve their own processes in creating websites for their clients.
And we do have a couple projects at the moment, but these are usually much, much bigger in volume. Because we’re just looking for these, they need some more like… they need some… how to say that?
Brian (06:45)
they need more like advanced knowledge or something or
Jessica Lyschik (06:48)
Yeah, yeah, more advanced knowledge. Yeah, that’s probably a good way to put it. And it’s like, sometimes we have to also like work on the product itself. And there’s a requirement, hey, we need this block to do it a little bit different, or we need to improve it at some point. It’s like, okay, then we do it in the Sky project first, and then we move it back or even simultaneously directly implemented into the product.
Brian (07:16)
And like, how do you explain Greyd? Cause a lot of people I think aren’t as aware of it, but it’s, it’s somewhere between something like a page builder on top of Gutenberg, where it gives you a lot more blocks and controls and things like that. Like something like Cadence would do, but then there’s this other side of it that’s like multi-site management and like for, you know, what I was attracted to was like, I’m running a bunch of similar sites and it has all these tools for.
cloning sites or syncing content across multiple sites and all these sorts of things. like, how do you describe Greyd to people who maybe don’t know what like, your like suite of products is?
Jessica Lyschik (07:53)
Sweet of products probably nails it pretty much. So it’s not just like we are enhancing the block editor with not only enhancing the core blocks, some of them, not all of them, but some of them, and also providing extra blocks like we have a tabs block and accordion block and
something that we call hotspot block. So you have an image and then you can put little hotspots that you can click on and then it shows some more information, just like some more specific things that are not in core at the moment. We do have some more enhancements for like button stylings and input stylings, which is also not something the core currently provides.
And then there’s like this whole other set of things of we, can create custom post types with our plugin. You can create pop-ups. So let’s say sign up for a newsletter pop-up, total classic on many websites. You can just do that with a great as well. Then we have great forms, which is a custom made forms plugin. It also works with the blog editor.
Brian (08:46)
Hmm
Jessica Lyschik (08:59)
So generally the idea is to like reduce the amount of plugins. Of course, like the Forms plugin is not super, it has not a gazillion features. It has like the basics and then of course a few interesting things here and there. But if you need something more specific, it is no problem to just not use the great Forms plugin and use a plugin of your choice. That’s totally doable at that point.
Brian (09:04)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (09:26)
And the last thing I think what really stands out in this whole software suite is like the global content feature. So this is basically where you can say, okay, I have a master website and I want to synchronize maybe design, maybe content, maybe both to either one or as many websites as you wish. So it’s just like you define it as this is by root.
this is my master website or main website or however you want to call it and then you can push your contents out to like wherever you want them to be. This can be on the same installation in a multi-site network but this can also be to other websites on a completely different hosting in a completely different environment if they are connected with each other.
Brian (09:56)
Hmm.
Yeah, I remember that like content syncing stuff, which I mean, I think a lot of people would be surprised that you can do that with the block editor because sometimes people feel like with the block editor, it’s really hard to like globally control content once it’s kind of mixed in with the templates and stuff like that. Like it gets a little tricky that and then even just simple things like, can spin up a staging site of a site on a multi-site or those sorts of things where there’s like this layer of stuff where
You kind of feel like it should be in core, but it’s also probably not that widely used. But for those people who like want it, it’s just like such a different experience. Do you work on the product or do you work on more of like client sort of like design to dev like agency style work? Like what do you specifically do?
Jessica Lyschik (11:03)
I do mostly work on the product. usually my day to day looks more like, okay, here’s a bug or let’s fix that or here’s a feature request. Let’s see how we can do that. And now I just started kicking off an internal project. I hope to maybe share something more about that soon. But I also do service, like customer support essentially.
Brian (11:26)
Hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (11:27)
Something I personally think as a developer brings you much more in touch with how our clients actually using your product. Because oftentimes when you’re a developer and you have a specific mindset of how something should be done or implemented, because from your developer point of view, that’s the most best practice or whatever you want to call it.
And then sometimes you come across clients that try to achieve something in a little bit different way or completely different way. And I always find it so interesting to see like what they are doing or what they are struggling with, because that also reflects to us, like, what is it actually? Is it something that is not
Brian (12:02)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (12:15)
explained well enough through the UI or through the user interface or is the user experience maybe not that great or whatever it basically is or is it really just a bug that no one else came across before and I think that gives you also a opportunity to work on the product itself if you’re actually dealing with customer support.
Brian (12:26)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think that’s kind of a general sense of just WordPress and the Gutenberg project in general. You know, there’s these skills that you need to build a WordPress website and there’s these skills you need to like build Gutenberg and contribute to it and stuff. And there’s, it’s really like very different. It’s, it’s, it’s kind of hard to say like a person who’s used to dealing with clients who are trying to move content around like that is going to have a lot of the same skills as like.
the crazy react application logic that you have to kind of understand when you try to do anything with the block editor. But I mean, you must, you must have to bridge both those gaps because on the one hand you’re building this product that sits on top of Gutenberg. So you do have to like build custom blocks, understand how all that works, understand how to extend it. But then you also led, you know, development on, I’ll say it right this time, the 2024 theme.
and also the Greyd theme, not really, you know, most agency people, you build a theme for one client. You like, you get a design, you build something for one client, but those are themes that have to be like user-friendly, I guess, in a way, or like, they have to have a wide appeal. Like, do have to approach those types of things differently than other stuff, because it’s a theme that’s meant to just like be more widely shared?
Jessica Lyschik (13:59)
That’s a good question. think it’s even a little bit different between 2024 and the great theme or great WP, which is basically the same thing as the great theme, just like…
ready made for the repository. So they are technically the same, but just little differences in like translation loading and the updater functionality. So the great theme has our own custom updater functionality, which the great WP theme does not because it’s it sits in the repository and gets updated through there. So with the 2024 theme, I think. It’s even harder because you have like
Brian (14:28)
Hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (14:35)
an enormous audience that potentially can use that theme and you’re not like able to like going down a specific niche to say, okay, this is only specific for this client. So this is like super narrow, super narrow focus at that point. If you do a theme for a specific client, you can implement custom features and
custom stylings, but the more you zoom out, the more you make it available for other people to use it, no matter if you allow them to use it with your, like with our suite plugins, so with the products that we use or that we create, but also like outside of that bubble. So the great WP theme works completely fine without the other great products. It’s completely independent at that point.
Brian (15:25)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (15:26)
And this was the great WP theme is mainly a good extension of the plugins, I would say. So you can like get the best of both worlds, basically. But it’s totally fine, even if you use any other theme with it, whether it be 2024 or the Oli theme or any other theme, basically that lives out there.
So there was a of a challenge for the great theme to be, it’s like, what parents do you provide? Like, where do you go? Or do you kind of keep it kind of generic so that it’s not pretty much a business website, which it basically is, it goes more into the business website features. So it’s less a blog if you compare it to like 2025, for example. So the latest default theme.
Brian (16:00)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (16:16)
So it has a bit of more focus on that, but with 2024 it was like going further, one step further than just like with the great theme. So the great, the 2024 happened first before I started working on the great theme. So I had some knowledge from 2024 that I could bring into that to make it happen. And with 2024, I just had this
more general idea because I looked at the previous default themes and they were all very focused on blogging and just like content in general whether it be text or maybe sometimes images so like photography or art or this kind of stuff so it’s not very much of a yeah business side and I have been working WordPress so long with mostly business websites and barely any
Brian (16:50)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (17:11)
any traditional blog, you will, that I thought like this was kind of missing from the default themes because WordPress can obviously do that. Of course, you need to work on it. You need to install some more plugins. You need to have a different design and so on. And I thought, why can we not showcase that WordPress is capable of much more than just being a blogging tool, which in my opinion, it absolutely is. So I came up with this idea of
Brian (17:34)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (17:38)
not just forgetting about the like blog themes like for a real blog or photography but instead combining it and making it interchangeable that you can use the same theme whether it be a business website a blog website or a photography website and this is actually the idea that
Maggie, my co-lead, who I worked with on 2024, absolutely liked from the very first moment. And I was really glad that we were able to push that idea through, because default themes always have to be…
have to be always approved by Matt Malenweig actually. So this is something many people probably don’t know, but it’s been a common thing ever since. So it’s not just like with 2024, it has been before that. So I remember I worked on the 2021.
Brian (18:19)
yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (18:35)
think it was the one with 5.6. The 5.6 release, which was the first underrepresented gender release back in the day. And I was also involved in that, in the release squad there already. So I joined that and I saw the process that was a bit behind the doors. So…
Brian (18:35)
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (19:01)
Back in the day, was actually that there were three designs pre-made. It’s like, here’s design one, here’s design two, here’s design three. And Matt was able to choose one design out of these three. So with 2024, it actually went a bit different because like, Maggie was a developer, I was a developer, we both were not designers and we were like, we can’t design this, so we need a designer on this.
Brian (19:25)
Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (19:27)
And it was a bit back and forth until finally it was announced that Beatrice Fialo, who also designed 2025 this year, she would be leading the design. that was like, from the moment we knew until like we set that Kaina-ish deadline where we wanted to see something, it was like two weeks. So there wasn’t much time actually about that. We just gave her the idea, what I just told you about these three different
Brian (19:33)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (19:54)
basically templates that we thought of that would be a great idea. And she just nailed it, which I still think she did an amazing job with this. And well, there wasn’t any other design choice, at least that I know. I don’t know if they shared something at Automatic at that time. But yeah, Meta proved it. So it was okay. And it was announced on Contributor Day at WorkCamp US in 2023, actually.
I was the one who was rushing into post this on the core block that morning. So yeah.
Brian (20:23)
and
Uh-huh. It’s, still stands as like the most unique theme, I think, cause the new one that just came out with WordPress 6.7 a return to, like you said, like that kind of magazine blog style where the homepage is a blog. And of course people have a lot of opinions about could, will WordPress ever ship with like an actual homepage that’s not the blog, you know, cause it’s, it is very common for those that make business sites to have a homepage.
Jessica Lyschik (20:40)
Mmm.
Brian (20:55)
and then have the blog sit under like slash blog. And we don’t usually use the homepage as the blog page, but in 2024, blog homepage template has a lot of starter content in it. And it has, you know, like kind of like a hero and like a little services type of area and all these sorts of things. And you load it and it looks really like, you know, like you said, like a business would load their website or a create content creator would.
want on the homepage of their website or all these other use cases, everybody except for like a blog or a publisher. So I was really surprised that they didn’t keep that up because it felt like a really popular idea. And it felt like a lot of people got really excited about that. And I know there’s technically the way the templates work. It’s not like the right way to do it. Cause you would normally change your homepage to not be the blog page, but it was yeah, very popular and, and unique. It’s very interesting that,
2025 did go back to that kind of like magazine blog, fashion styling and stuff like that. curious to see if affect how many people use it. If people really are doing more blogs than marketing sites than people think or what that’s gonna look like. But I’m kind of curious to see how 2024 and 2025 like, you know, pair off over the next year now that we have these two options.
Jessica Lyschik (22:15)
Yeah, that’s a very interesting thought there. So I wasn’t involved in 2025. I was like being in the loop at the beginning for a bit, during the actual development I wasn’t so much involved. So yeah, you’re right. It’s actually, it will be interesting to see like where is the main focus of WordPress because
Brian (22:27)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (22:40)
I don’t think anyone of us knows, like we all probably know, like we, as people who work in agencies or product companies, we mostly deal with like business websites at some point and less with like traditional blog websites, which are getting less and less anyway, because like, yeah, people use social media and especially the younger generations. They’re not like, I just got a comment.
A while ago actually talking to someone in their early 20s like about creating a blog and she was like, why would you create a blog? Just use Instagram. It’s like, why would you do that? It’s like so much work. Just use Instagram. It’s like, yeah. I come from a different world, I guess.
Brian (23:12)
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean I understand why people start on there and then you do see a lot of people eventually They get a big audience or something and then they realize wait it I should get my audience to live somewhere else so that I’m not like an algorithm gives you a bunch of audience really quickly, but it also controls that audience and you know some little change and suddenly your audience doesn’t see you and that sort of thing so it’s definitely like a
like a bit of a tricky bargain if that’s the way you’re gonna grow your content. But I agree.
Jessica Lyschik (23:54)
Yeah, and they can maybe also maybe also just block you for some reason or restrict your content because like you’re breaking some rules for for whatever. So I know that, for example, on YouTube, it’s quite popular or quite common. The popular common is the right word here. If you have any kind of music content on your channel, like chances are high that whoever music.
Brian (24:16)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (24:17)
a label will come after you and say, hey, you stole our music and then you will get eventually taken down your channel, for example. And if you just rely on that, probably not the best idea, I guess.
Brian (24:31)
Yeah, definitely. mean, I think there’s always gonna be a use case for bringing people back to your website. I think there’s also like a reverse thing where like there was a lot of websites that used WordPress. Like I think a good example is like a recipe blogs that got so huge. And then, know, recipes went from like, here’s my recipe. I’m just throwing them on the internet to like.
Here’s my recipe with like 500 ads as you try to load it and a million little videos, auto playing and all this stuff. And now it’s turning into, I don’t even need to go to your website because you know, chat GPT read all the recipe websites and can make its own recipes now. And you know, it’s like seeing all the difference and that’s just one little area, but like WordPress was really the core of all of those types of websites that were people were putting a lot of content. So I’m really like.
curious to see where it’s gonna go and if we’re gonna see new people lean into like new types of content on WordPress or if there’s gonna be new reasons to do it, especially as people wanna maybe have a little more control over that. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just hopeful.
Jessica Lyschik (25:39)
Yeah, I totally get that. it’s like,
I totally remembered one recipe website I frequently use that I really like. And just like you said, it’s ads everywhere. it’s just usually what I do is like I take when I see a recipe and I like it, I copy it into my notion, which has no ads. So it’s just, I put a link back there to the original content. So if I need to go back and check for some reason.
Brian (25:58)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (26:06)
I can still so, but the recipe and the instructions are all living in notion. That’s the information I need. I do not need 25 different ads for shoes and bags and whatnot on something that is totally not related to food at this point.
Brian (26:20)
Yeah.
Yeah, I’m curious to see also if, you where WordPress is gonna lean into, you know, it seems like the big focus obviously right now is full site editing.
I think the goal of full-side editing was you know for people who make like recipe blogs and stuff like that was originally I think the target audience people who make these sorts of blogs and want to get their content out there now they get a little bit more control over design and stuff it seems like It’s actually a lot of agencies who are really enjoying it and are really getting into it. Are you guys full in on full-side editing?
Jessica Lyschik (26:55)
Absolutely. So the great theme has a predecessor, which is the great sweet now classic theme, basically. That was a classic theme, actually. So this did work with the traditional way. And we made the switch, I think it was early last year.
Brian (27:03)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (27:15)
No, only this year. Sorry, To like completely, fully go with a great theme, which is a block theme.
And we know we haven’t retired the classic theme yet, but like we’re not actively working on that theme anymore. We just like maintain it for a little more while because like there are a lot of client websites that are still working with this theme. So we don’t do not want to cut them off immediately. So they have they are forced to switch to a blog theme because the thing is. I mean, full site editing has done.
a huge step forward in the past one, two years, I would say. So it is being usable by now. It wasn’t in the beginning, let’s be honest at this point. And for us, it’s the way to go. And it’s what we want to support because we want to stay to as close to core as possible and then just enhancing what core does not provide at the moment to be super useful and
Something that we see as a pattern happening over various agencies with various clients that they need this kind of feature. This is something we want to provide. So we want to help them create better with WordPress without having to use this one plugin that brings this block or this functionality or use a giant
plugin where you get a ton of blocks where you only need two basically. So we want to focus on the ones that we think make a website and that are actually useful to people.
Brian (28:43)
Hmm.
And I feel like I would bet that your Greyd suite has some sort of tool for navigation for like headers. Do you have something in there for even like mega menus or even just like better menus or are you guys using like the core navigation menu block?
Jessica Lyschik (29:09)
Ooh, yeah, that’s a tough topic there, because it’s a pain in the ass for many people, the navigation block. yeah, what we do have, so you can of course use the navigation block. We do have some enhancements there, when I remember correctly, but…
Brian (29:16)
Yes.
Jessica Lyschik (29:28)
We often combine the features with what we call popover block. So this is either a button, this can be a regular button, or we have an variation that it’s just a hamburger menu. And that opens up a, what we call popover. So it can like be an off-converse, it can be full, full screen. are several different options there. And then in there, you can put whatever navigation you would like to.
Brian (29:47)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Jessica Lyschik (29:57)
You can put the navigation in there, some extra links, whatever basically. gives you the inner blocks feature so you can add basically any block into there.
Brian (30:09)
like search icons social icons or search bar. Yeah. Okay.
Jessica Lyschik (30:10)
search bar, yeah exactly. And this gives much more flexibility. And then we have also, not sure if it’s already in the plugin or not, but you can create navigations with the query loop and taxonomies. This is something very special that we had to recreate for a client project, if I remember correctly. And
To be honest, I have not worked on this, so I cannot tell so much about it, but it’s definitely something super interesting because then what’s the pain in the ass with a navigation block is it’s kind of hard to use. So it’s not super intuitive, especially if you’re used to work with navigations like we did in the past pre-block themes era. You had this overview website in the backend where you could like…
drag and drop your menu items and assign them custom values, custom text or link specifically or have plugins that have enhanced these menu items with icons and stuff like that. So there was a lot that you could do with these old menus.
Brian (31:22)
Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (31:26)
We’re not quite there yet with the core. So yeah, it’s actually a very interesting field to enhance the block editor at that point. And there’s many possibilities what you can do or what are the requirements. So yeah, that’s a very deep topic.
Brian (31:29)
Yeah.
Yeah, that is kind of, yeah, it’s like the last really hard part, I think. I think everything else feels a little good, but that, yeah, that navigation header area. I mean, you’re right. The way Greyd does it, I do remember actually seeing that where you have your popover like block already. And that actually makes a lot of sense because probably like half of the hard menus I’ve designed in the last year, that’s generally what they want is some sort of off-canvas thing with a lot of little custom stuff in it.
my last question for you is, tracking Gutenberg right now? And do you have a sense of like what’s coming in the next year or like specific things you’re you and your team are excited about? Or is there anything just like coming in Gutenberg that’s like, I can’t wait for this to like really be ready to use, or just like features that you’re like keeping your eye on or anything like that.
Jessica Lyschik (32:35)
Well,
There’s currently nothing I have specifically on my agenda. I do, like part of my work is also like checking out, okay, what’s going on in core. but right now I do not have like a specific feature that is upcoming. Something that we keep an eye on is like, I mentioned earlier that we have like an accordion and a tabs block, shipping with Greyd and there, there’s work being done to, bring that as core block. So that’s something we keep an eye on is like, okay, so.
Brian (32:44)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (33:05)
something in core happens that is basically a functionality of ours. It’s like, okay, what does it look like? Is it very similar to us for it? I think the tabs block is very, very similar in that case. And then it’s like, okay, this is coming in. Do we need to retire? Can we retire? Can we transform basically? Can we write a transform to make it possible to use either core block or our block? Kind of like that kind of things is something I look out for.
Brian (33:17)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (33:33)
I think what will be very interesting in the future is kind of the data views. bringing what we have in our traditional posts and pages and custom post types overviews, bringing that to the site editor essentially.
Brian (33:39)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (33:50)
I’ve been only watching this so far. What’s going on there? What’s happening? But this is something we definitely will have to experiment with. is it something we can use for our product? Does it make sense? Or is it like, okay, maybe it’s a bit too early for that. Yeah, that’s basically it. What exists currently on my radar.
There’s a lot of things I wish there would be in core, but I’m not so sure what the current state of that is actually.
Brian (34:16)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I’m, I think that the data views stuff is, I’ll go everything that’s happening right now is so like, it’s a foundation for later. Cause like once they finish data views or get into a good place, then they can start bringing more like settings pages into the site editor. Cause it can handle like tables and forms and things like that. And then I’m sure for like you guys who have like custom settings pages, maybe eventually you can start bringing those in and stuff, but it’s like, it’s a long.
roadmap before any of those things I think are going to be like, like everything has to go through core and it has to be like really tested and really like iterated and stuff. And then it’s like, they really don’t want to let anybody else play with it until they are sure that it’s good because otherwise you get stuck with something and you can’t change it. So I’m definitely like curious to see what happens. And I, I think the tap, like you said, the tabs and the accordion block, those are really good examples of something like the
interactivity API that was around for a while and has been worked on. But like those are blocks that will use it and you’ll start seeing, cool, like now interactive blocks like animated blocks, JavaScript powered blocks are all going to be using these tools. So it’s like, okay, we’re starting to see things come out all these like foundational stuff they’ve been working on. it’s sometimes it feels like it’s moving really slow, but I also feel like that’s probably smart, you know.
That’s probably the smart way to do things.
Jessica Lyschik (35:50)
Yeah, I think another good example on this is like the blockbindings API that now got into 6.7, which is kind of more usable actually than it was before because like with, I don’t know, it was, was it 6.5 or 6.6 where it got like, you could actually work with it, but only if you added stuff to a PHP file. And now you can actually like,
Brian (36:11)
Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (36:15)
use it in the editor itself without having to actually create PHP files and register any custom fields for that specifically.
Brian (36:27)
Yeah, it’s like, think all that stuff, like once it gets in there and we start seeing the power of it, I think people will get more excited. It’s just, like you said, a full-sided editing just got kind of usable in the last year it’s, know, you can feel pretty safe using a full setting theme. And now all the like fancy hard stuff that we do as agency developers building out more complicated designs or more complicated interactive elements and stuff.
Now we’ll start seeing some of that make its way in probably over the next couple of years, but I think that’s exciting.
Jessica Lyschik (36:59)
Yeah, coming back to the block writings, it’s what we have actually as a feature in Grid as well. So we call it dynamic text. And it’s basically…
Brian (37:07)
huh.
Jessica Lyschik (37:09)
just what blockbindings do, but we can do it with any type of content already and it’s only limited to like I think core only allows paragraph, heading, image and button at the moment and like with our plugin you can do it with almost every type of content or type of plugin where you can like have actual text in it so you can add
Brian (37:21)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (37:31)
bring your content from either a custom post type or even a core post type. You can add fields through there and then display them in a query loop or wherever you need them.
Brian (37:43)
Yeah, I’m excited about that.
Jessica Lyschik (37:45)
And generally we are like two, three years ahead with the great plugin of what is core. And now we are seeing, okay, what’s coming into core. And it’s fairly similar what blockbinding is to our dynamic tags actually.
Brian (37:59)
And I feel like there’s, there’s just value in agencies that have the resources to like be a little bit ahead of core and to kind of see like, well, you know, now when they go, we want to add whatever an accordion block. It’s like, well, now 20 people have made accordion blocks and have them. And we can go and see like, what did we learn from this? What makes it hard? Because a lot of times the hardest part with the block editor is the user experience. It’s like, we can all make an accordion. That’s not really that hard.
It’s how do I make it editable in the block editor in a way that makes sense where like the navigation block we learned that’s really hard. Like the user experience of editing it is hard to nail down. So it’s kind of nice to use, like forging ahead, testing these things out, doing a lot of stuff that even though you know it’s gonna get in core, you can contribute back just like experience. Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (38:53)
Feedback, yeah.
Brian (38:56)
that you want to point people to follow you online or like learn more from you.
Jessica Lyschik (39:01)
I think I have all my links on my website jessicalesik.com I’m on most social networks it’s like under my name I mostly use Twitter now a switching to Blue Sky at the moment basically serving them both so that’s where you most likely will find me and yeah check out great great.io if you’re interested and yeah
Brian (39:24)
Awesome. Thank you, Jessica.
Jessica Lyschik (39:26)
Thank you.
Brian (00:00)
Hey Jessica, welcome and thanks for joining me.
Jessica Lyschik (00:02)
Hey, thanks for having me, thank you.
Brian (00:04)
Yeah, it’s good to see you again. Maybe for people who don’t know you, although I feel like that’s as many people these days, you give a background kind of of like, you know, where you work, what you do, how you got into WordPress, that sort of thing?
Jessica Lyschik (00:18)
Yeah, of course. So my name is Jessica Lischek. I am a WordPress developer, core contributor, jack of all trades, master of some probably. I think we can talk about this a bit later on what I actually do in this whole WordPress world. I joined the WordPress community about 10 years ago when I attended my first WordCamp and I’ve been following those.
a of folks on Twitter for a while and was like, hmm, there’s an event. Okay, let’s go there. I did not know anyone except for following few people online. And then it just, I was met with so much like, so I felt so welcome there to be there, even if I was a total nobody. And yeah, it kind of sticked. So I sticked around and attended more work camps, joined the local meetup and then step by step.
When the job opportunity came to move into a WordPress agency, just like I took that opportunity and from there on, I’ve been around basically. So I’ve been doing mostly community work in my first couple of years. So like helping with meetups and work camps as an volunteer speaker, later on also organizer.
And I’ve always worked as a web developer. my original background, like my first 10 years that I worked as a web developer were at another company that
I had a ERP system basically and I was in the department for the web development and I was actually working with Python back in the day. So very old school, very old school Python, nothing of the new fancy stuff. But yeah, Python was my first language that I really got into as a backend language. But I’ve always been much of a fan of the front end, be honest. So HTML, CSS, JavaScript was always my kind of vibe.
Brian (01:56)
Okay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Jessica Lyschik (02:16)
And yeah, the switch to WordPress wasn’t that hard because I’ve been using WordPress since 2005 or 2006, that long ago. And yeah, that was pretty easy moving over and getting more into
Brian (02:16)
Uh-huh.
Dang. Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (02:33)
like bigger projects than just a hobby website basically. So I joined a site or imp site as they were previously called at first for about four years, four and a half years, something like that. And yeah, then I worked at a smaller agency. Then I took a little break, like a sabbatical like break, but I was still around basically in the community, but not like having actual work at the time. Then I joined Xtendify and now after one year,
Brian (02:40)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (03:01)
It has been one year anniversary for me, the picking of November. I joined Greyd a year ago. So yeah.
Brian (03:07)
So you’ve kind of done like a little bit of everything. It’s funny that you said you gravitated towards front end, because I feel like a lot of people might remember you as being one of the developers on the 2023 theme, which was kind of the big WordPress theme. Wait, 2024. yeah, because this year is the 2025 theme at the end of 2024. that is, yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, like a new theme coming out for next year.
Jessica Lyschik (03:19)
the four one. Yes.
Five theme, exactly.
It’s always been confusing, I know.
For the next year, exactly.
Brian (03:35)
I guess I never really thought about that. one of the things that, you know, I thought we both have in common is we’ve both done the speed build challenge for Jamie different word camps. And then did you just do one in the last few weeks?
Jessica Lyschik (03:48)
Just last week in Rome at the Core Days, there was a little event organized by the Italian community. They called it Core Days. was not like a traditional work camp. I mean, it still had tracks and such, but it was much more focused on like… So there was no SEO talks or no business talks or whatever. It was purely like technical talks. Some, I think, I don’t think it was workshops, but there was like a bar camp style session slot.
And also a speed build challenge actually. And this was kind of last minute for me. So I did not originally plan to go, but I was like, hmm, Cordes, that sounds interesting. It’s a different kind of word cam. So yeah, should I go? Yeah, let’s go. If, if tickets are still available, why not? And then Jamie saw me on the attendee list and was like reaching out saying, hey, I still need someone for the speed build. And I was like, well, okay.
Brian (04:22)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (04:44)
I can do that, but the thing is I don’t want to push myself forward to like, I have to do this. I would rather see more people doing it just like you did at WorkMBS. But I said, okay, if you do not find someone else, then I will do it. That’s okay.
Brian (04:51)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I’m really jealous of Europe because it seems like you have a lot more word camps and just events, even just fun, you know, conferences and things like that. just, on the West Coast of the US, we really just don’t have that. Although I think PressConf is coming back next year, which will be like a big one. But yeah, you guys have so many fun conferences. When you did the speed build, use the Greyd suite?
Jessica Lyschik (05:26)
No, actually not. I thought about doing so, but Jamie presented us with the WordPress.org website and I was like, okay, I guess there’s not much need for anything else. So I just stick with the 2024 theme and just build it from there actually. But I was wanted to do it, but maybe I should do a speed build challenge on my own YouTube channel somewhere soon.
Brian (05:50)
Yeah. Yeah, so maybe you could explain, cause Greyd is interesting cause it’s a product company, right? But you’re also an agency or is there less agency work now?
Jessica Lyschik (06:03)
Let’s say it’s mixed, to be honest. So we do have the product and we do focus on the product, but we do have some projects that are like lighthouse projects, basically bigger and need more attention than the people we usually sell our product to. So these are other agencies that we work with and they use our product to improve their own processes in creating websites for their clients.
And we do have a couple projects at the moment, but these are usually much, much bigger in volume. Because we’re just looking for these, they need some more like… they need some… how to say that?
Brian (06:45)
they need more like advanced knowledge or something or
Jessica Lyschik (06:48)
Yeah, yeah, more advanced knowledge. Yeah, that’s probably a good way to put it. And it’s like, sometimes we have to also like work on the product itself. And there’s a requirement, hey, we need this block to do it a little bit different, or we need to improve it at some point. It’s like, okay, then we do it in the Sky project first, and then we move it back or even simultaneously directly implemented into the product.
Brian (07:16)
And like, how do you explain Greyd? Cause a lot of people I think aren’t as aware of it, but it’s, it’s somewhere between something like a page builder on top of Gutenberg, where it gives you a lot more blocks and controls and things like that. Like something like Cadence would do, but then there’s this other side of it that’s like multi-site management and like for, you know, what I was attracted to was like, I’m running a bunch of similar sites and it has all these tools for.
cloning sites or syncing content across multiple sites and all these sorts of things. like, how do you describe Greyd to people who maybe don’t know what like, your like suite of products is?
Jessica Lyschik (07:53)
Sweet of products probably nails it pretty much. So it’s not just like we are enhancing the block editor with not only enhancing the core blocks, some of them, not all of them, but some of them, and also providing extra blocks like we have a tabs block and accordion block and
something that we call hotspot block. So you have an image and then you can put little hotspots that you can click on and then it shows some more information, just like some more specific things that are not in core at the moment. We do have some more enhancements for like button stylings and input stylings, which is also not something the core currently provides.
And then there’s like this whole other set of things of we, can create custom post types with our plugin. You can create pop-ups. So let’s say sign up for a newsletter pop-up, total classic on many websites. You can just do that with a great as well. Then we have great forms, which is a custom made forms plugin. It also works with the blog editor.
Brian (08:46)
Hmm
Jessica Lyschik (08:59)
So generally the idea is to like reduce the amount of plugins. Of course, like the Forms plugin is not super, it has not a gazillion features. It has like the basics and then of course a few interesting things here and there. But if you need something more specific, it is no problem to just not use the great Forms plugin and use a plugin of your choice. That’s totally doable at that point.
Brian (09:04)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (09:26)
And the last thing I think what really stands out in this whole software suite is like the global content feature. So this is basically where you can say, okay, I have a master website and I want to synchronize maybe design, maybe content, maybe both to either one or as many websites as you wish. So it’s just like you define it as this is by root.
this is my master website or main website or however you want to call it and then you can push your contents out to like wherever you want them to be. This can be on the same installation in a multi-site network but this can also be to other websites on a completely different hosting in a completely different environment if they are connected with each other.
Brian (09:56)
Hmm.
Yeah, I remember that like content syncing stuff, which I mean, I think a lot of people would be surprised that you can do that with the block editor because sometimes people feel like with the block editor, it’s really hard to like globally control content once it’s kind of mixed in with the templates and stuff like that. Like it gets a little tricky that and then even just simple things like, can spin up a staging site of a site on a multi-site or those sorts of things where there’s like this layer of stuff where
You kind of feel like it should be in core, but it’s also probably not that widely used. But for those people who like want it, it’s just like such a different experience. Do you work on the product or do you work on more of like client sort of like design to dev like agency style work? Like what do you specifically do?
Jessica Lyschik (11:03)
I do mostly work on the product. usually my day to day looks more like, okay, here’s a bug or let’s fix that or here’s a feature request. Let’s see how we can do that. And now I just started kicking off an internal project. I hope to maybe share something more about that soon. But I also do service, like customer support essentially.
Brian (11:26)
Hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (11:27)
Something I personally think as a developer brings you much more in touch with how our clients actually using your product. Because oftentimes when you’re a developer and you have a specific mindset of how something should be done or implemented, because from your developer point of view, that’s the most best practice or whatever you want to call it.
And then sometimes you come across clients that try to achieve something in a little bit different way or completely different way. And I always find it so interesting to see like what they are doing or what they are struggling with, because that also reflects to us, like, what is it actually? Is it something that is not
Brian (12:02)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (12:15)
explained well enough through the UI or through the user interface or is the user experience maybe not that great or whatever it basically is or is it really just a bug that no one else came across before and I think that gives you also a opportunity to work on the product itself if you’re actually dealing with customer support.
Brian (12:26)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think that’s kind of a general sense of just WordPress and the Gutenberg project in general. You know, there’s these skills that you need to build a WordPress website and there’s these skills you need to like build Gutenberg and contribute to it and stuff. And there’s, it’s really like very different. It’s, it’s, it’s kind of hard to say like a person who’s used to dealing with clients who are trying to move content around like that is going to have a lot of the same skills as like.
the crazy react application logic that you have to kind of understand when you try to do anything with the block editor. But I mean, you must, you must have to bridge both those gaps because on the one hand you’re building this product that sits on top of Gutenberg. So you do have to like build custom blocks, understand how all that works, understand how to extend it. But then you also led, you know, development on, I’ll say it right this time, the 2024 theme.
and also the Greyd theme, not really, you know, most agency people, you build a theme for one client. You like, you get a design, you build something for one client, but those are themes that have to be like user-friendly, I guess, in a way, or like, they have to have a wide appeal. Like, do have to approach those types of things differently than other stuff, because it’s a theme that’s meant to just like be more widely shared?
Jessica Lyschik (13:59)
That’s a good question. think it’s even a little bit different between 2024 and the great theme or great WP, which is basically the same thing as the great theme, just like…
ready made for the repository. So they are technically the same, but just little differences in like translation loading and the updater functionality. So the great theme has our own custom updater functionality, which the great WP theme does not because it’s it sits in the repository and gets updated through there. So with the 2024 theme, I think. It’s even harder because you have like
Brian (14:28)
Hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (14:35)
an enormous audience that potentially can use that theme and you’re not like able to like going down a specific niche to say, okay, this is only specific for this client. So this is like super narrow, super narrow focus at that point. If you do a theme for a specific client, you can implement custom features and
custom stylings, but the more you zoom out, the more you make it available for other people to use it, no matter if you allow them to use it with your, like with our suite plugins, so with the products that we use or that we create, but also like outside of that bubble. So the great WP theme works completely fine without the other great products. It’s completely independent at that point.
Brian (15:25)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (15:26)
And this was the great WP theme is mainly a good extension of the plugins, I would say. So you can like get the best of both worlds, basically. But it’s totally fine, even if you use any other theme with it, whether it be 2024 or the Oli theme or any other theme, basically that lives out there.
So there was a of a challenge for the great theme to be, it’s like, what parents do you provide? Like, where do you go? Or do you kind of keep it kind of generic so that it’s not pretty much a business website, which it basically is, it goes more into the business website features. So it’s less a blog if you compare it to like 2025, for example. So the latest default theme.
Brian (16:00)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (16:16)
So it has a bit of more focus on that, but with 2024 it was like going further, one step further than just like with the great theme. So the great, the 2024 happened first before I started working on the great theme. So I had some knowledge from 2024 that I could bring into that to make it happen. And with 2024, I just had this
more general idea because I looked at the previous default themes and they were all very focused on blogging and just like content in general whether it be text or maybe sometimes images so like photography or art or this kind of stuff so it’s not very much of a yeah business side and I have been working WordPress so long with mostly business websites and barely any
Brian (16:50)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (17:11)
any traditional blog, you will, that I thought like this was kind of missing from the default themes because WordPress can obviously do that. Of course, you need to work on it. You need to install some more plugins. You need to have a different design and so on. And I thought, why can we not showcase that WordPress is capable of much more than just being a blogging tool, which in my opinion, it absolutely is. So I came up with this idea of
Brian (17:34)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (17:38)
not just forgetting about the like blog themes like for a real blog or photography but instead combining it and making it interchangeable that you can use the same theme whether it be a business website a blog website or a photography website and this is actually the idea that
Maggie, my co-lead, who I worked with on 2024, absolutely liked from the very first moment. And I was really glad that we were able to push that idea through, because default themes always have to be…
have to be always approved by Matt Malenweig actually. So this is something many people probably don’t know, but it’s been a common thing ever since. So it’s not just like with 2024, it has been before that. So I remember I worked on the 2021.
Brian (18:19)
yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (18:35)
think it was the one with 5.6. The 5.6 release, which was the first underrepresented gender release back in the day. And I was also involved in that, in the release squad there already. So I joined that and I saw the process that was a bit behind the doors. So…
Brian (18:35)
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (19:01)
Back in the day, was actually that there were three designs pre-made. It’s like, here’s design one, here’s design two, here’s design three. And Matt was able to choose one design out of these three. So with 2024, it actually went a bit different because like, Maggie was a developer, I was a developer, we both were not designers and we were like, we can’t design this, so we need a designer on this.
Brian (19:25)
Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (19:27)
And it was a bit back and forth until finally it was announced that Beatrice Fialo, who also designed 2025 this year, she would be leading the design. that was like, from the moment we knew until like we set that Kaina-ish deadline where we wanted to see something, it was like two weeks. So there wasn’t much time actually about that. We just gave her the idea, what I just told you about these three different
Brian (19:33)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (19:54)
basically templates that we thought of that would be a great idea. And she just nailed it, which I still think she did an amazing job with this. And well, there wasn’t any other design choice, at least that I know. I don’t know if they shared something at Automatic at that time. But yeah, Meta proved it. So it was okay. And it was announced on Contributor Day at WorkCamp US in 2023, actually.
I was the one who was rushing into post this on the core block that morning. So yeah.
Brian (20:23)
and
Uh-huh. It’s, still stands as like the most unique theme, I think, cause the new one that just came out with WordPress 6.7 a return to, like you said, like that kind of magazine blog style where the homepage is a blog. And of course people have a lot of opinions about could, will WordPress ever ship with like an actual homepage that’s not the blog, you know, cause it’s, it is very common for those that make business sites to have a homepage.
Jessica Lyschik (20:40)
Mmm.
Brian (20:55)
and then have the blog sit under like slash blog. And we don’t usually use the homepage as the blog page, but in 2024, blog homepage template has a lot of starter content in it. And it has, you know, like kind of like a hero and like a little services type of area and all these sorts of things. And you load it and it looks really like, you know, like you said, like a business would load their website or a create content creator would.
want on the homepage of their website or all these other use cases, everybody except for like a blog or a publisher. So I was really surprised that they didn’t keep that up because it felt like a really popular idea. And it felt like a lot of people got really excited about that. And I know there’s technically the way the templates work. It’s not like the right way to do it. Cause you would normally change your homepage to not be the blog page, but it was yeah, very popular and, and unique. It’s very interesting that,
2025 did go back to that kind of like magazine blog, fashion styling and stuff like that. curious to see if affect how many people use it. If people really are doing more blogs than marketing sites than people think or what that’s gonna look like. But I’m kind of curious to see how 2024 and 2025 like, you know, pair off over the next year now that we have these two options.
Jessica Lyschik (22:15)
Yeah, that’s a very interesting thought there. So I wasn’t involved in 2025. I was like being in the loop at the beginning for a bit, during the actual development I wasn’t so much involved. So yeah, you’re right. It’s actually, it will be interesting to see like where is the main focus of WordPress because
Brian (22:27)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (22:40)
I don’t think anyone of us knows, like we all probably know, like we, as people who work in agencies or product companies, we mostly deal with like business websites at some point and less with like traditional blog websites, which are getting less and less anyway, because like, yeah, people use social media and especially the younger generations. They’re not like, I just got a comment.
A while ago actually talking to someone in their early 20s like about creating a blog and she was like, why would you create a blog? Just use Instagram. It’s like, why would you do that? It’s like so much work. Just use Instagram. It’s like, yeah. I come from a different world, I guess.
Brian (23:12)
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean I understand why people start on there and then you do see a lot of people eventually They get a big audience or something and then they realize wait it I should get my audience to live somewhere else so that I’m not like an algorithm gives you a bunch of audience really quickly, but it also controls that audience and you know some little change and suddenly your audience doesn’t see you and that sort of thing so it’s definitely like a
like a bit of a tricky bargain if that’s the way you’re gonna grow your content. But I agree.
Jessica Lyschik (23:54)
Yeah, and they can maybe also maybe also just block you for some reason or restrict your content because like you’re breaking some rules for for whatever. So I know that, for example, on YouTube, it’s quite popular or quite common. The popular common is the right word here. If you have any kind of music content on your channel, like chances are high that whoever music.
Brian (24:16)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (24:17)
a label will come after you and say, hey, you stole our music and then you will get eventually taken down your channel, for example. And if you just rely on that, probably not the best idea, I guess.
Brian (24:31)
Yeah, definitely. mean, I think there’s always gonna be a use case for bringing people back to your website. I think there’s also like a reverse thing where like there was a lot of websites that used WordPress. Like I think a good example is like a recipe blogs that got so huge. And then, know, recipes went from like, here’s my recipe. I’m just throwing them on the internet to like.
Here’s my recipe with like 500 ads as you try to load it and a million little videos, auto playing and all this stuff. And now it’s turning into, I don’t even need to go to your website because you know, chat GPT read all the recipe websites and can make its own recipes now. And you know, it’s like seeing all the difference and that’s just one little area, but like WordPress was really the core of all of those types of websites that were people were putting a lot of content. So I’m really like.
curious to see where it’s gonna go and if we’re gonna see new people lean into like new types of content on WordPress or if there’s gonna be new reasons to do it, especially as people wanna maybe have a little more control over that. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just hopeful.
Jessica Lyschik (25:39)
Yeah, I totally get that. it’s like,
I totally remembered one recipe website I frequently use that I really like. And just like you said, it’s ads everywhere. it’s just usually what I do is like I take when I see a recipe and I like it, I copy it into my notion, which has no ads. So it’s just, I put a link back there to the original content. So if I need to go back and check for some reason.
Brian (25:58)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (26:06)
I can still so, but the recipe and the instructions are all living in notion. That’s the information I need. I do not need 25 different ads for shoes and bags and whatnot on something that is totally not related to food at this point.
Brian (26:20)
Yeah.
Yeah, I’m curious to see also if, you where WordPress is gonna lean into, you know, it seems like the big focus obviously right now is full site editing.
I think the goal of full-side editing was you know for people who make like recipe blogs and stuff like that was originally I think the target audience people who make these sorts of blogs and want to get their content out there now they get a little bit more control over design and stuff it seems like It’s actually a lot of agencies who are really enjoying it and are really getting into it. Are you guys full in on full-side editing?
Jessica Lyschik (26:55)
Absolutely. So the great theme has a predecessor, which is the great sweet now classic theme, basically. That was a classic theme, actually. So this did work with the traditional way. And we made the switch, I think it was early last year.
Brian (27:03)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (27:15)
No, only this year. Sorry, To like completely, fully go with a great theme, which is a block theme.
And we know we haven’t retired the classic theme yet, but like we’re not actively working on that theme anymore. We just like maintain it for a little more while because like there are a lot of client websites that are still working with this theme. So we don’t do not want to cut them off immediately. So they have they are forced to switch to a blog theme because the thing is. I mean, full site editing has done.
a huge step forward in the past one, two years, I would say. So it is being usable by now. It wasn’t in the beginning, let’s be honest at this point. And for us, it’s the way to go. And it’s what we want to support because we want to stay to as close to core as possible and then just enhancing what core does not provide at the moment to be super useful and
Something that we see as a pattern happening over various agencies with various clients that they need this kind of feature. This is something we want to provide. So we want to help them create better with WordPress without having to use this one plugin that brings this block or this functionality or use a giant
plugin where you get a ton of blocks where you only need two basically. So we want to focus on the ones that we think make a website and that are actually useful to people.
Brian (28:43)
Hmm.
And I feel like I would bet that your Greyd suite has some sort of tool for navigation for like headers. Do you have something in there for even like mega menus or even just like better menus or are you guys using like the core navigation menu block?
Jessica Lyschik (29:09)
Ooh, yeah, that’s a tough topic there, because it’s a pain in the ass for many people, the navigation block. yeah, what we do have, so you can of course use the navigation block. We do have some enhancements there, when I remember correctly, but…
Brian (29:16)
Yes.
Jessica Lyschik (29:28)
We often combine the features with what we call popover block. So this is either a button, this can be a regular button, or we have an variation that it’s just a hamburger menu. And that opens up a, what we call popover. So it can like be an off-converse, it can be full, full screen. are several different options there. And then in there, you can put whatever navigation you would like to.
Brian (29:47)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Jessica Lyschik (29:57)
You can put the navigation in there, some extra links, whatever basically. gives you the inner blocks feature so you can add basically any block into there.
Brian (30:09)
like search icons social icons or search bar. Yeah. Okay.
Jessica Lyschik (30:10)
search bar, yeah exactly. And this gives much more flexibility. And then we have also, not sure if it’s already in the plugin or not, but you can create navigations with the query loop and taxonomies. This is something very special that we had to recreate for a client project, if I remember correctly. And
To be honest, I have not worked on this, so I cannot tell so much about it, but it’s definitely something super interesting because then what’s the pain in the ass with a navigation block is it’s kind of hard to use. So it’s not super intuitive, especially if you’re used to work with navigations like we did in the past pre-block themes era. You had this overview website in the backend where you could like…
drag and drop your menu items and assign them custom values, custom text or link specifically or have plugins that have enhanced these menu items with icons and stuff like that. So there was a lot that you could do with these old menus.
Brian (31:22)
Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (31:26)
We’re not quite there yet with the core. So yeah, it’s actually a very interesting field to enhance the block editor at that point. And there’s many possibilities what you can do or what are the requirements. So yeah, that’s a very deep topic.
Brian (31:29)
Yeah.
Yeah, that is kind of, yeah, it’s like the last really hard part, I think. I think everything else feels a little good, but that, yeah, that navigation header area. I mean, you’re right. The way Greyd does it, I do remember actually seeing that where you have your popover like block already. And that actually makes a lot of sense because probably like half of the hard menus I’ve designed in the last year, that’s generally what they want is some sort of off-canvas thing with a lot of little custom stuff in it.
my last question for you is, tracking Gutenberg right now? And do you have a sense of like what’s coming in the next year or like specific things you’re you and your team are excited about? Or is there anything just like coming in Gutenberg that’s like, I can’t wait for this to like really be ready to use, or just like features that you’re like keeping your eye on or anything like that.
Jessica Lyschik (32:35)
Well,
There’s currently nothing I have specifically on my agenda. I do, like part of my work is also like checking out, okay, what’s going on in core. but right now I do not have like a specific feature that is upcoming. Something that we keep an eye on is like, I mentioned earlier that we have like an accordion and a tabs block, shipping with Greyd and there, there’s work being done to, bring that as core block. So that’s something we keep an eye on is like, okay, so.
Brian (32:44)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (33:05)
something in core happens that is basically a functionality of ours. It’s like, okay, what does it look like? Is it very similar to us for it? I think the tabs block is very, very similar in that case. And then it’s like, okay, this is coming in. Do we need to retire? Can we retire? Can we transform basically? Can we write a transform to make it possible to use either core block or our block? Kind of like that kind of things is something I look out for.
Brian (33:17)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (33:33)
I think what will be very interesting in the future is kind of the data views. bringing what we have in our traditional posts and pages and custom post types overviews, bringing that to the site editor essentially.
Brian (33:39)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (33:50)
I’ve been only watching this so far. What’s going on there? What’s happening? But this is something we definitely will have to experiment with. is it something we can use for our product? Does it make sense? Or is it like, okay, maybe it’s a bit too early for that. Yeah, that’s basically it. What exists currently on my radar.
There’s a lot of things I wish there would be in core, but I’m not so sure what the current state of that is actually.
Brian (34:16)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I’m, I think that the data views stuff is, I’ll go everything that’s happening right now is so like, it’s a foundation for later. Cause like once they finish data views or get into a good place, then they can start bringing more like settings pages into the site editor. Cause it can handle like tables and forms and things like that. And then I’m sure for like you guys who have like custom settings pages, maybe eventually you can start bringing those in and stuff, but it’s like, it’s a long.
roadmap before any of those things I think are going to be like, like everything has to go through core and it has to be like really tested and really like iterated and stuff. And then it’s like, they really don’t want to let anybody else play with it until they are sure that it’s good because otherwise you get stuck with something and you can’t change it. So I’m definitely like curious to see what happens. And I, I think the tap, like you said, the tabs and the accordion block, those are really good examples of something like the
interactivity API that was around for a while and has been worked on. But like those are blocks that will use it and you’ll start seeing, cool, like now interactive blocks like animated blocks, JavaScript powered blocks are all going to be using these tools. So it’s like, okay, we’re starting to see things come out all these like foundational stuff they’ve been working on. it’s sometimes it feels like it’s moving really slow, but I also feel like that’s probably smart, you know.
That’s probably the smart way to do things.
Jessica Lyschik (35:50)
Yeah, I think another good example on this is like the blockbindings API that now got into 6.7, which is kind of more usable actually than it was before because like with, I don’t know, it was, was it 6.5 or 6.6 where it got like, you could actually work with it, but only if you added stuff to a PHP file. And now you can actually like,
Brian (36:11)
Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (36:15)
use it in the editor itself without having to actually create PHP files and register any custom fields for that specifically.
Brian (36:27)
Yeah, it’s like, think all that stuff, like once it gets in there and we start seeing the power of it, I think people will get more excited. It’s just, like you said, a full-sided editing just got kind of usable in the last year it’s, know, you can feel pretty safe using a full setting theme. And now all the like fancy hard stuff that we do as agency developers building out more complicated designs or more complicated interactive elements and stuff.
Now we’ll start seeing some of that make its way in probably over the next couple of years, but I think that’s exciting.
Jessica Lyschik (36:59)
Yeah, coming back to the block writings, it’s what we have actually as a feature in Grid as well. So we call it dynamic text. And it’s basically…
Brian (37:07)
huh.
Jessica Lyschik (37:09)
just what blockbindings do, but we can do it with any type of content already and it’s only limited to like I think core only allows paragraph, heading, image and button at the moment and like with our plugin you can do it with almost every type of content or type of plugin where you can like have actual text in it so you can add
Brian (37:21)
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik (37:31)
bring your content from either a custom post type or even a core post type. You can add fields through there and then display them in a query loop or wherever you need them.
Brian (37:43)
Yeah, I’m excited about that.
Jessica Lyschik (37:45)
And generally we are like two, three years ahead with the great plugin of what is core. And now we are seeing, okay, what’s coming into core. And it’s fairly similar what blockbinding is to our dynamic tags actually.
Brian (37:59)
And I feel like there’s, there’s just value in agencies that have the resources to like be a little bit ahead of core and to kind of see like, well, you know, now when they go, we want to add whatever an accordion block. It’s like, well, now 20 people have made accordion blocks and have them. And we can go and see like, what did we learn from this? What makes it hard? Because a lot of times the hardest part with the block editor is the user experience. It’s like, we can all make an accordion. That’s not really that hard.
It’s how do I make it editable in the block editor in a way that makes sense where like the navigation block we learned that’s really hard. Like the user experience of editing it is hard to nail down. So it’s kind of nice to use, like forging ahead, testing these things out, doing a lot of stuff that even though you know it’s gonna get in core, you can contribute back just like experience. Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik (38:53)
Feedback, yeah.
Brian (38:56)
that you want to point people to follow you online or like learn more from you.
Jessica Lyschik (39:01)
I think I have all my links on my website jessicalesik.com I’m on most social networks it’s like under my name I mostly use Twitter now a switching to Blue Sky at the moment basically serving them both so that’s where you most likely will find me and yeah check out great great.io if you’re interested and yeah
Brian (39:24)
Awesome. Thank you, Jessica.
Jessica Lyschik (39:26)
Thank you.