Building Etch: Why Does WordPress Need Another Page Builder? ft. Kevin Geary

Brian Coords headshot Kevin Geary

In this chat with Kevin Geary, he tackles the elephant in the room: does WordPress really need another page builder? Drawing from his experience in the WordPress community, Kevin makes a compelling case for rethinking how we build websites, exploring everything from AI’s potential role to the impact of different CSS frameworks. Along the way, he shares candid insights about the current limitations of WordPress development and his ideas for moving the ecosystem forward.

Brian (00:00)
so welcome today. have somebody who needs no introduction, but I’ll let him introduce himself anyway, Kevin Geary. Welcome to the show.
Kevin (Geary.co) (00:07)
Thank you for having me, Brian.
Brian (00:09)
How do you describe yourself to the community now? What’s your official job title?
Kevin (Geary.co) (00:14)
Man, I’m just the CEO of a software company now at this point, guess. But a WordPress educator and software developer, yeah, those are the two main titles.
Brian (00:26)
Yeah. Cause you still do, regular live streams and, and, and videos and everything. Right. So, I mean, you’re still, you’re still doing the education, right?
Kevin (Geary.co) (00:33)
Yeah, yeah, I’m still heavy on the education side of things. Still have the Inner Circle, still do agency education as well. That’s pretty much what the Inner Circle is focused on. So my YouTube stuff is all web design education. And then the Inner Circle side of things is very heavy on the agency freelancer side of education.
Brian (00:51)
Okay. Do you even know like business a little bit more or a little more structuring, getting clients, that kind of stuff. Okay.
Kevin (Geary.co) (00:55)
For sure. Yeah. Yeah. We
do all the sales, uh, pricing, everything that you need to do to run a successful agency. And, and really it’s to level up as well. Like get out of the, uh, you know, I do $2,500 website kind of things, you know, it’s getting to the 10,000 mark, the 20,000 mark, the 50,000 mark and on and up.
Brian (01:04)
Nice.
Yeah, I think if you’re at that like beginner WordPress level, you got to get into some sort of program like that. got to, mean, the information is so good out there. Any of these tools, they always pay for themselves after like a client. Like it’s always worth it.
Kevin (Geary.co) (01:28)
yeah,
yeah. 100%. Yeah, that’s why I tell people people ask me about stack and then they they’re like, but you know, I’m trying to control costs and are there free options for that? I’m like, dude, just it’s the price of these things is so insanely low. It’s not even worth consideration. You know, as long as you’re putting them to good use.
Brian (01:50)
Yeah, yeah, you got to put in the effort. gotta, you gotta like do what you do, but like there’s, there’s just value to having somebody laid out for you, especially in WordPress, where a lot of people, myself included, just walk in off the street and start making websites, you know?
Kevin (Geary.co) (02:04)
Yes. Yeah, that’s there’s no barrier to entry, right? It’s you can learn. And then you have a laptop and you have WordPress and you have a few plugins. You’re off to the races.
Brian (02:14)
Yeah, well, I think the reason I wanted to talk today to you is really about, obviously, etch is kind of the big frame because that seems to be like, the big, masterpiece that you’re working on. Can you give like the high level overview? Like what is etch? What are you guys cooking up?
Kevin (Geary.co) (02:30)
Yeah, etch is a what we call a unified visual development environment. So the closest thing to it is a page builder, but it does things that page builders don’t do, which is very important. And it’s called a unified development environment because it unifies the workflow. And the way that I explain it is you can obviously page build in it, but you can always have full access to the code unlike most page builders.
And then you could do other things you typically can’t do. For example, if you’re building a page and you need a custom post type and you need custom fields attached to that, you can do all of that right within edge natively media management inside of edge natively. You don’t have to leave the area you’re working to go to these other special areas to do special work and then come back and then you know a workflow and WordPress typically is very disjointed. So we’re unifying that we’re bringing it all to one place and we’re building it to where.
actual developers are going to hopefully want to use it. And even beginners, as long as they aspire to be doing professional work in this industry, it’s going to be a tool that they’re going to want to use as well.
Brian (03:35)
I mean, WordPress itself, like you said, disjointed is really the word for WordPress because you got your form plugin and you got your custom fields plugin and you got your theme and you got all these different things and stuff. mean, is your goal to eliminate the need for 20 different plugins and get, you know, the SEO plugin, the, are you, are you trying to eliminate that? Are you trying to find a way to integrate it with it? How are you thinking about that?
Kevin (Geary.co) (04:00)
Yeah, I think that it would be great if edge was kind of the standard. It’s like you, you know, what is your stack? My stack is edge. It’s not like I need this plugin and that plugin and piece all these things together. If you look at obviously there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of plugins, even in specific niches in WordPress. But the cream rises to the top. And if you ask people,
What do you recommend for custom fields? know, they’re going to say ACF. They’re going to say meta box. They’re going to say one of these like leading options, right? And all the other options are not really considerations because they’re either too limited or the UX is really bad or there’s something, you know, atrocious about them to where everybody flocks to these one or two. And, you know, edge can be.
Brian (04:26)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin (Geary.co) (04:41)
that for it can be that thing that’s at the top of everybody’s list. You know, making a good custom fields plug-in and making a good custom post types plug-in. I mean, this stuff is essentially native and WordPress just doesn’t have a UI. It’s not like it’s not it’s a magic. OK, so we can do that on top of what we’re doing on the page building side of things and make it very effective. If you’re going to compare.
the media library, for example, the native media library in WordPress. I don’t really know anybody that likes that. Most people have to install a bunch of plugins to make media management palatable in WordPress. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist just make a better media management experience. So we think we can do that in etch. So these are examples of just how we’re not. We’re not trying to do everything. All these plugins do, but the bulk of people’s workflow where they normally have to.
use all of these different tools, they can use a unified environment.
Brian (05:35)
Yeah, I think that’s been one of my issues with WordPress is it really does like to give you the first 20 % of any feature. Some other somebody comes in and then you got to have 50 plugins. Like you said, the plugin to make the media library, all that sort of stuff. I mean, at a certain point then what’s the value, what’s the value of WordPress? Why not just build a page builder just from scratch or is it, you know what I mean? Like what, what does WordPress giving you that you needed it to be on WordPress?
Kevin (Geary.co) (05:59)
Yeah.
Well, I mean, there is the whole CMS side of it, right? That we don’t want to have to build. But then there’s just the ecosystem and the community and the momentum. That’s not easily replaceable, right? We’ve been in WordPress the entire time. Our other products are built for WordPress. We like WordPress. We believe in WordPress. I would like to see things improved in certain areas of the admin and the CMS, but…
It is what it is. And when we look out at alternatives, they’re not really there. They’re not as viable as we want them to be. So this is the choice that we’ve made. And I think it’s a good fit.
Brian (06:38)
And you know, one of things is like WordPress has decided to have its own native page building experience in it. And, but even more than that, it’s basically said like every new feature now only comes in the page builder. Like they’re probably going to do custom post types at some, a UI for that at some point in time. It will be in Gutenberg. It’s not going to be in the legacy PHP. It’s probably not even going to show up unless you have a
Block theme enabled or something like that. Like that’s where they’re going and that’s where they’re putting their attention on. and so obviously you can be an alternative that Elementor is a very successful, big alternative that they’re doing great. All they’re making a lot of websites and a lot of money and they don’t touch any of that stuff and they’re, they’re super fine. But basically what you’re building is kind of like saying, you know, we’re taking WordPress as it exists right now as the foundation, because we know WordPress is not.
going to build these features for everybody else. They’re just not going to.
Kevin (Geary.co) (07:36)
Yeah, they’re just not going to. And if they try, like you said, you’re going to get 20 % of what you actually want and need. It’s just, it’s too watered down. It’s too for everybody. You know, that’s, that’s the problem with it. And so
The good thing about WordPress is that you can circumvent all of that. It doesn’t matter how outdated a lot of these WP admin areas are if you don’t really ever need to use them. If I don’t need to go to the media library, the native media library in WordPress, I don’t care what it looks like or how it functions. So, etch is giving me something much more modern, much better. Just one example, the…
idea of either tagging or folderizing. I don’t really like folders in this day and age. Like I feel like tags are a lot more extensible, but tagging photos and then being able to loop through specific tags or logic that has to do with tags. That’s one of the first things we’re going to be doing in Edge. So that alone right there to be able to categorize images and media properly and then loop through them on the pages to create galleries or whatever you’re trying to do.
just doesn’t exist in the the native media library. you know that’s it’s those it’s not just a better UI or a better UX. We’re actually looking at advanced functionality that people want and need in this kind of environment.
Brian (08:48)
mean, galleries are a good example because you would think I have this big media library. Let me just select 10 images and tag them and show them on a page or something like that. You can’t. So what does the typical WordPress developer do? They make a gallery custom post type with an ACF repeater field. you can’t even use the ACF gallery field because you probably want to do captions or whatever. So you do a repeater and it’s the most obnoxious way to input information. It’s…
Kevin (Geary.co) (08:56)
Yeah. Yeah.
It’s awful.
Brian (09:14)
It’s just terrible. And then you maybe put that in as a short code somewhere. So like that was the legacy way of building these sorts of things. And you know, the other day it works. all ties together and stuff, but it feels like the problems we have now are like, you can’t do anything with WordPress. It’s, it’s the user experience of building it. That’s the hardest part to solve that everybody seems to struggle with whatever page blur was popular now in two years. Suddenly everybody gets mad at the user experience of it because we’ve learned other trends.
Kevin (Geary.co) (09:30)
Yes.
Brian (09:42)
So how do you guys focus on the actual user interface of what you’re building? Because that seems to be what’s going to have to differentiate it.
Kevin (Geary.co) (09:50)
Correct. Yeah, I think we’re just starting with a different question. The question that page builders have started with historically is how do we make an interface that’s very user friendly and especially friendly to beginners because the idea was that only beginners would use a page builder. you know, somebody that knows how to write code, they would never use a page builder.
What we’ve actually found though is that a UI type workflow does have a lot of benefits even for people who know how to write code. And the problem is the tools that were available to them were not designed for them. The tools that are available were designed for beginners and that really frustrates professionals. It really frustrates people who do know how to write code. For one, if you open a page builder and it’s writing horrible code that you would never write of that quality, you don’t want to put your name on that. That’s number one.
And then if the page builder doesn’t allow you to do something and you’re like, OK, cool, let me just get to the code and I’ll just do it myself because I know how to do that. And the page is like, we don’t really allow people to do that, you know. So the code is like very hidden away. That’s another frustration. And so those are deal breakers. I think that most people who do know how to write code and want to write code, they’re not going to put up with. Right. And so itch doesn’t have those kinds of limitations because itch didn’t say
How can we make an interface that doesn’t scare beginners? Ed said, what can we do with this concept of a visual development environment that actually takes professional development to the next level where a person who does know how to write code and likes to write code can come in one feel like this expedites their process and their workflow makes them work faster, puts more stuff at their fingertips that they don’t have to worry about doing manually and at the same time never limits them.
and never creates restrictions and writes code as well as they would write it when they when they allow it to that. That’s kind of what we’re looking at. And so we’re innovating a professional development workflow rather than trying to convince people to use these dumbed down interfaces and tools that just create a bunch of restriction essentially.
Brian (11:55)
Have you looked at other CMSs? There’s say like Webflow or Wix for agencies, ones that are trying to say, we are, we are traditionally a page builder, but we’re trying to get agencies to buy in. Do you look at these other tools to see how they’re solving these problems?
Kevin (Geary.co) (12:10)
Yeah, I try to look at as many as I can. There hasn’t been a ton I’ve been impressed with. I don’t know if you’ve seen any that have stood out to you.
Brian (12:18)
No, I see it’s like what you’re describing. I have the same issue where half the time I say, like, I just want to write the code myself because I know I can and it’s going to be faster. And then I think, what am I, I don’t even need this. Let me just write some code. could do this whole website in HTML and CSS and move on with my life. And then the other times you’re thinking, well, no, I, I do like that. can drag a module or a component or a block in, and it does all the querying for me. And I just, know, sometimes you want that, but like you said, like
I want both, I want the best of both worlds. And I don’t know if that’s like an ideal that’s not realistic or if that is attainable.
Kevin (Geary.co) (12:52)
We think it’s attainable, and so far we’re attaining it as far as progress in Edge goes. You can free write HTML. You’re going to be able to write PHP. You’re going to be able to write JavaScript, whatever you want to do. But again, it’s like I can drag in a query loop element, and I can handle a very complex query, maybe even a nested query. And I can do that from not just post, but users and taxonomies or even a third party API. And I can.
I can configure that kind of loop in 60 seconds that you would, I mean, you would take you a long time writing that by hand, you know? So it’s that kind of thing where a professional, and by the way, you have access to the PHP of the loop, you know? So if you don’t, there’s a UI, if you want to use the UI to configure the loop, or for someone like you, where you’re like, no, just let me have, let me get out the PHP, you know?
You could do that. And then you could save your different query loop configurations. can componentize them. It’s just… That’s what we’re looking at. It’s like, how can we really innovate a professional workflow? And not just spend our time trying to dumb this stuff down.
Brian (13:56)
You know, one of the places I do have that sort of a workflow is I’ll sometimes use AI to scaffold a chunk of code that I need. And then I’ll go through and be like, all right, you gave me like, you know, the base, kind of crappy version, but it’s enough where I’m not writing every single line by hand. I feel like a lot of people are leaning into that. Have you thought about like AI as like an effect on whether you build a page builder, what it’s going to mean, if you’re even using it internally or, or what.
Kevin (Geary.co) (14:22)
No,
mean, well, we use it for sure. As far as whether we would build a page loader, I don’t think for us, it’s not at that level yet. And it’s really an assistant, right? And that’s the way that you’re using it. And we see people using AI inside of Edge in that way, know, like copilot type functionality.
Or even a window that comes up where instead of having to go to clod or wherever to you know put in those ideas and ask for that scaffolding you can just be doing that inside of edge That’s a possibility as well, and then it’s up to you whether you want to commit the code that’s being spit back at you so on and so forth Then that’s really the the difference between there’s there’s no page builder for WordPress that allows you to free write HTML
So you can’t even ask Claude you can like in a page builder environment. Typically you can’t ask why hey write me some HTML for this and then put it in. There’s no way to get it in but in X you can just take what’s given to you and pop it right in and it’s all parsed. So you know there’s a lot of advantages there and just the. The idea of writing HTML CSS and just seeing it live right like you’re not having to use dual monitors. It’s everything that you’re doing is appearing instantly on the canvas so.
there’s just lot of advantages to it. Even if you were gonna write every single line of code by hand.
Brian (15:37)
And like one of your kind of key areas that you’re really, I mean, you know a lot about and focus on is CSS design systems, like maintainability. It’s you. one of your big criticisms of the block editor that it doesn’t really have a strong design system. Like it has half of a design system and then it doesn’t go all the way and you kind of are always fighting it. I have to imagine that’s central to your premise of etch, which is design systems and.
Kevin (Geary.co) (15:56)
Yeah.
Brian (16:04)
and building scalable CSS or Class B CSS? How are you thinking about that?
Kevin (Geary.co) (16:08)
Yes, so there’s going to be a framework builder essentially inside of edge. So you’re going to be able to create global variables and global utility classes if you want to organize them all. Or you can just install a CSS. It’s going to work seamlessly with automatic CSS. And that’s what probably most users are going to do, especially with given the education and just the amount of development that’s gone into a CSS.
But it is going to have a framework builder essentially for anybody that wants to come in. So you don’t have to use ACSS. You could really use any framework that you wanted to use or you could just build your own inside of Vetch. But I think, and I’ve been pretty vocal about it, that everybody that is good at CSS either uses a commercial framework or frameworks. Like they do the framework themselves, right?
But nobody’s just doing a bunch of random values and non-tokenization and no thought process and nobody’s doing that that’s actually doing professional work, right? So those things have to be there. It kind of myths me that it’s really not there inside of WordPress. Like you said, they have a partial one, I guess. It doesn’t seem all that well thought out. But without standardization, you know, like we just look at the pattern library in WordPress as an example. mean,
When you import a pattern, third party, like what are you actually, you’re just importing a bunch of randomness and static values and maybe, like I don’t even know. The CSS doesn’t live with the pattern, which is a problem in and of itself. I just see that as dead in the water until they find a way to standardize this stuff.
Brian (17:39)
Yeah. And there was, mean, there, the conversations happened before, before it was too late, you know, before the ship had sailed, there were some big voices making that argument and it didn’t get done. like say like automatic CSS. I mean, I agree with you. Everybody, whether you built or using a framework or you just have written more than five lines of CSS, eventually you, eventually there’s a framework there, whether you admit it or not. Um, how do you compare like ACSS to say like Tailwind, which is a really popular framework.
Kevin (Geary.co) (17:46)
Yeah. Yeah.
Right. Yeah.
Brian (18:07)
Are they conceptually similar or conceptually different?
Kevin (Geary.co) (18:10)
They’re pretty much opposites of each other. Automatic CSS is not a utility first framework. We don’t use utility classes for everything. In fact, we’re very reliant on BIM methodology, or that’s what we promote as kind of the best way to organize your custom classes. But we call it a variable first framework. Everything is tokenized. The tokens are all related to each other. So it’s a very tight system. It makes.
Brian (18:13)
Okay.
Kevin (Geary.co) (18:35)
very good logical sense. Everything is there that you need. And then your workflow is essentially custom classes and using the variables and tokens in your CSS, whether you’re putting those in the builder inputs or whether you’re just writing CSS. It’s going to work either way, obviously. But yeah, we have a full utility class library. almost tell people, and you can turn it all off, right? We have a Pro Mode switch, which is essentially
It only leaves behind the stuff that you would typically use utility classes for and then turns off all of the other ones and goes for custom classes. Now the downside to this is the idea that when you’re doing BEM, you have to write a lot of class names. So you have to put one on the block and then every single element has to have a class name and then you use the conventions and yada yada yada. It’s very tedious and a lot of people would say, I don’t want to hassle with that. I just want to do utility classes or whatever. So we
developed a feature called Auto BEM. And it essentially, so the one downside of BEM, which is you have to write a lot of class names and attach them to all of your elements, is completely solved. You click one single button, you tell the tool, in this case ACSS, but this will be an etch as well, you tell the tool the name of the block, so like service card, and it takes your structure panel labels and every single thing that you’ve labeled, which…
Brian (19:38)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin (Geary.co) (19:52)
And you could do this either way. Actually, you can not label it and you can do auto BEM and label it in auto BEM and then it’ll carry over to your structure panel. But with the click of a button, it puts the classes on every single element. All BEM structured, perfect syntax, everything. So that one thing that’s normally like a, a headache and a nightmare is done for you instantly. And it ensures that you’re following best practices, that everything’s maintainable and scalable, that your structure panel is organized. It does it all for you automatically.
Brian (20:09)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin (Geary.co) (20:19)
So that’s the kind of innovation that we’re doing is we’re looking for real problems where, okay, we know the value of BEM, but there’s this giant headache. Okay, well, we can just solve that with the visual builder technology, right? That’s an example yet again of where if I’m not using a builder, I don’t have that functionality. I am sitting there writing classes by hand. But if I use a visual builder environment like etch or automatic CSS, that’s done for me. So, and that’s just one area of dozens and dozens.
Brian (20:28)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I guess, mean, tailwind, which is very popular in the JavaScript world now and the Larva world. It’s like you have one HTML element and it has 50 classes on it. Cause you have all of your utility classes with like the kind of BEM approach. do phase it. You end up having one, hopefully class per element, but you end up with a lot of classes, maybe on your CSS, you know? And so instead of looking at the HTML and having to parse through a bunch of class names.
Kevin (Geary.co) (20:58)
Correct.
Brian (21:15)
You go over to the CSS and you’re looking at, you said, probably a lot of variables. My border is set to this variable and my background color is this variable and that sort of thing. And it’s, it’s definitely a trade-off. makes the HTML probably a lot more readable. it’s maybe less transferable than like a tailwind because it’s not, you know, my classes are not always going to end up being yours, but I guess that’s what automatic CSS solves. It’s like, you’ve kind of written a lot of the class names and that sort of thing.
Kevin (Geary.co) (21:41)
Well, that’s actually what…
Okay, so let’s talk about shareability or portability of a pattern, like a hero section, for example. So here’s more advantages to using a visual development environment that actually does things the right way, in a modern way and an innovative way. So number one is that another downside that Tailwind people would say is, don’t want to maintain a style sheet.
Brian (21:48)
Yeah.
Kevin (Geary.co) (22:03)
I don’t want to write this like style sheet and keep it maintained and yada yada yada and then flip back and forth between like my HTML, my CSS, that’s terrible. But in a visual development environment like Edge, and this is true in bricks as well actually, if I’m creating a hero section, I’m writing CSS for that hero section, the CSS can live with that hero section. It is not written to this giant global style sheet, okay? So it is just seamlessly written to that element.
Brian (22:27)
Hmm.
Kevin (Geary.co) (22:31)
much like a JavaScript component would do. And when I share that hero section, the CSS goes with it. Now, I’m also in that CSS not statically mentioning the class names. I’m using dynamic selectors. It’s a root selector. So when I do that, it’s essentially finding and replacing. But it knows the class name that’s in my database for that element.
But if I share that hero and that person wants to change all the class names, they can easily do that and they can do it in seconds with AutoBem. They want to rename everything because that’s part of AutoBem. None of their CSS will break because all the CSS is using dynamic references for the name. It’s not even using the static name. So the shareability of this is tremendous. And this is actually what Frames is all based on. So our product Frames is a whole library of different patterns that people can use and share.
And so people can seamlessly just, I’ll take that hero, I’ll take this feature section, I’ll take, and all the CSS still works. And because it’s all built with ACSS, it all speaks the same language. It’s using the same tokens behind the scenes. Anybody can do anything and move between sites without, you know, zero issues essentially.
Brian (23:36)
And I guess that’s the value of having a really strong opinion in your tools, having a tool that’s really opinionated. And like you said, not trying to be everything to everybody, just saying, you know what, there’s trade-offs to every approach. We’re gonna pick one right way to do it. And we’re just gonna lean fully into it and not sort of decide by committee what the best approach to building a website is. Yeah.
Kevin (Geary.co) (23:40)
Yes, yeah. Yeah.
Right.
Opinions is so important because without the opinions, all you have is chaos. And without guardrails and limitations, you actually want to work with a set of limitations. You we had a big debate and actually people still try to debate us on this, but it’s very clear that having these guardrails is important is the color system. You know, so we have primary, secondary, tertiary, we have base, we have accent, and then we have neutral.
And people are like, no, I want unlimited color. I want to be able to create my own colors and name my own colors. OK, well you can do that for sure. By the way, nothing in ACS is stopping you from doing it. You would just have to do it by hand. The UI isn’t going to facilitate that, but it’s not stopping you from doing it, right? So if you wanted to do that, you absolutely could. But if you go that route, if you do that route, you have essentially disconnected yourself from the ecosystem. So now the shareability of patterns out the window.
Brian (24:30)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin (Geary.co) (24:52)
because you’re using tokens now that you just made up out of thin air. And there’s really no point in doing it because all of the colors that are there as options are all you need. And people will be like, well, you know, I really, I just, I don’t like the name tertiary. I just wanted to be my own. It’s like, but just allow yourself to live between the guard rails because it’s going to solve so many other headaches for you.
It’s much more important to solve those issues than it is to argue over the word tertiary, right? So just go with the word tertiary. It’s just a standard, it’s setting a standard.
Brian (25:20)
Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve. Yeah.
And I was setting up a series thing where there was so many color options and then you’re, trying to use a framework that you, you have eight color options that they’ve used throughout the system. And then you’re kind of like, well, I don’t, I don’t, my brand doesn’t need eight colors. It needs four, you know, really like solid colors most for most of everything. So then you’re starting to make decisions about that, like whatever fifth color, that sixth color you’re going, I don’t know where it was used.
Kevin (Geary.co) (25:36)
Yeah. Right.
Brian (25:48)
I don’t know what it was for. I don’t know what I should turn it into. Yeah, I’m with you that a lot of times what people think they want is not often what they want. I mean, you must be getting a ton of opinions because you opened up Edge early. You did like an early access. You brought in a community of people who fundraise it. They obviously feel some sort of level of ownership, you know, because they invested into it early.
They probably have a lot of ideas. How do you balance ideas with like execution?
Kevin (Geary.co) (26:19)
We have a vision for where we want the product to go and what the product is supposed to look like. Mainly what we are getting feedback on is the small details involved around those things. So we will put out the major feature in the way that we envision it and then we let users use it and then they tell us, I don’t like this little thing or can you tweak this or whatever. They’re not having a.
a decision over major stuff, but what they are doing is they’re molding what we give them into something that they really like and enjoy. So it’s not a situation where we’re like, hey, just everybody submit your ideas and we’ll just figure out which we already have a vision for the product. We know what we want to build and we know how it is supposed to work, but we want people to be able to, especially on the UX side of things, just say, hey, this is really annoying.
Like the way that you envision, like I see where you’re going with it, but right now it’s really annoying. Can you do it this way to make it better? Yeah, sure. We can, we can do it a different way to make it better. That’s the kind of stuff we’re looking for.
Brian (27:16)
Have you released anything where that feedback really informed a direction or changed a direction where once real people started using it, it was like, we thought this was gonna work this way, but it really didn’t or anything like that?
Kevin (Geary.co) (27:28)
So one feature that I wanted to wait a lot longer on, but everybody kept harping on it over and over, was the modularity of the UI. Where we have the edge bar down below at the very bottom, that’s pretty much where you do all of your work. And then obviously some people are like, well, I want to take the CSS and put it on the side, or I want to take the HTML and put it on the side, or whatever.
Brian (27:37)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin (Geary.co) (27:50)
And I wanted that to be something that we tackle way down the line, but it kept coming back and the feedback over and over again, like, we don’t want it to be forced down here on us, right? So we explored the modularity, and that’s actually now, I’m glad we explored that part, because I do enjoy taking the CSS and putting it off to the side and working the way that I want to work, and then other people can work the way that they want to work, because now it’s modular. So…
That’s the kind of thing. I think it’s more of timeline stuff. I thought we could, another one is CSS inputs. People are really, really clamoring for the CSS input side of the UI so they don’t have to write all their CSS by hand. And then of course we have the idea of linking the two together. Because in every other page builder, it’s out of sync. Your custom CSS and the inputs do not stay synced together. And so it’s always confusing, like where did…
Brian (28:35)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin (Geary.co) (28:40)
that thing gets dialed, is it dialed in the inputs, is it dialed in CSS, Edge isn’t gonna have that problem because if you write CSS, it’s gonna populate the inputs that match those properties and vice versa. So that’s something that we were originally gonna tackle like month seven, eight, nine, somewhere in there, we’re now gonna tackle it in month four.
Brian (28:58)
Yeah, I mean, I would have been with you too about the modularity of the UI where you’re like, no, that’s not like that’s such an like, that’s like the frosting on the cake. You’re missing the point. That’s not, that’s not the important stuff, but sometimes people like they just have to be able to get, know, it’s just sometimes you just have to do it. I kind of get that. And, and that was actually when we first talked about Edge, one of the things that sold me the most was this idea that like your source of truth is your CSS and
Kevin (Geary.co) (29:05)
It’s like a preference thing. Yes, yes, correct.
Yeah, it’s like a block. Yeah.
Brian (29:25)
having a bunch of UI fields for every freaking CSS attribute that exists is fine. And people want that and stuff, but like the end of the day, just keep it your HTML is your HTML, your CSS is your CSS. Nothing’s abstracted. It’s all back to being the actual elements, the way that they were intended, the way that, you know, is going to lead to better accessibility, better structure, better performance, all that sort of stuff. So, I think that’s pretty cool. Can, can people, go ahead.
Kevin (Geary.co) (29:50)
Yeah,
I was going to say too, it’s, you know, because for me, I don’t like to hunt and peck inputs, obviously. You know, there’s a downside to that. There’s the upside of if people aren’t comfortable writing CSS, they can do their work and they can have a good experience because the CSS inputs are there and exist and yada yada yada. But for somebody that does know how to write CSS, especially if you want to do more stuff with the dynamic root selector, you can stem off of the dynamic root selector to handle all your BIM and
With nesting, it’s fantastic. It’s SaaS powered as well. So you can do a bunch of SaaS magic inside of it. That’s all much more preferable to the CSS inputs. So if somebody is like me or probably like you, they can actually turn off the inputs. So you can opt into a CSS first workflow. then you will not be bugged by the existence of CSS. They just won’t be there. And you can just write your CSS and enjoy your life. But for the people who want and need it, it’ll be there for them to turn on.
Brian (30:38)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing where, where this goes, just because like you said, there is a weird thing between beginners and advanced developers in WordPress. And we’re constantly teetering between the two. And you know, I think page builders traditionally said they really gear towards beginners. think it’ll be interesting if we can see a page builder community that really knows.
HTML and CSS at a much deeper level than maybe we’ve seen in the past. think that would be a huge improvement to the ecosystem and would be an onboarding to, know, for the kind of people that end up building the plugins of the future and the integrations of the future and stuff like that. I mean, that stuff’s important.
Kevin (Geary.co) (31:16)
Yes.
Yeah, I think that’s my whole point behind Era 4. That is what I envision as the next era of WordPress, is people doing work, professional work, in this visual development environment. I’m sure Edge is not going to be the only one. Once it catches on and kind of sets the stage, I think a whole ecosystem is going to develop around these kinds of professional visual tools. And it’s just going to create a new reality for us. And I think it’s going to be a very fun reality.
Brian (31:54)
Yeah, and hopefully that influences the direction of the core project as well, leaning into power users as well. Can people still get Etch right now or is it closed to sign up for it?
Kevin (Geary.co) (31:59)
Hopefully.
It is
closed, but it will be open again soon. So we’re not waiting until the Alpha is actually ready. know, big, obviously we hit all the numbers that we wanted to hit by far when we did the initial launch. But the biggest objection by far was you want us to buy in and you have, you’re not showing us anything, right? So the next round will be the, guess what? We can show you things now. And so we’re going to do one more round, probably in a couple of months.
And then the next one, it’ll be closed again until the actual alpha comes out, which will be later this year. know, people were worried about the timeline. We’re ahead of schedule. It will be usable this year for building brochure websites. So if you have a basic brochure site project and you want to build it with etch, you are going to be able to build it with etch. And of course, part we didn’t talk about, but the major part of it, because we did mention there is Gutenberg, there is a native builder inside of WordPress.
Brian (32:56)
Hmm, yeah.
Kevin (Geary.co) (32:58)
Etch writes everything that you’re doing to Gutenberg blocks, native Gutenberg blocks. And so one of the big selling points of Etch is the data liberation side of it. It does liberate your data and your content and your designs, your layouts into the block editor so that you are not reliant on the actual page builder, you know, for rendering, for really anything.
Brian (33:19)
Yeah, I feel like we have to do a separate conversation in the future about that, I have a lot of questions about that process specifically and where the value is. But where can people go to get on a waiting list, get more content from you, that sort of thing.
Kevin (Geary.co) (33:24)
Yes. Yes.
Yeah, so geary.co is pretty much where I have links to everything. If you’re interested specifically in edge, go to HWP.com. Check me out on YouTube. Check me out on X.
Brian (33:44)
Awesome. Thanks Kevin.
Kevin (Geary.co) (33:46)
Thank you.

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