Free WordPress Dev Courses and the Future of Ollie ft. Mike McAlister

Brian Coords (00:00)
Welcome today on Webmasters of I got Mike McAllister, designer, site builder, company owner, and now educator. Am I getting all of it? All of the buckets there? Woodworker.
Mike (00:10)
I Woodworker, photographer, or whatever you
want. Just throw them all in, like everything. I do everything.
Brian Coords (00:18)
Yeah. I guess people probably know you as like Ollie WP and a few other things, but maybe you can give like the like for people who don’t know you the one sentence like what is Ollie? What is your role?
Mike (00:22)
Mm-hmm.
Yep, Ollie is a WordPress block theme and it has a pro counterpart that is effectively a design library, which makes building pages in the site editor super quick and painless. So we’re kind of one of the most kind of on the forefront of the block building thing and kind of modern WordPress site building. We’re kind of playing in that space.
Brian Coords (00:51)
Yeah, mean, you’re kind of like the de facto reigning champs of block themes, I think. I don’t know what the competition is out there, but it seems like anytime I see people talking about it, they’re always talking about Ollie. They’re not really talking about block themes specifically. It’s like its own brand.
Mike (00:55)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah,
yeah, I know it’s funny. I think part of that was being early and kind of relentless and like not trying to own that space, but just like being serious about creating a good product there. But then I think there’s also this effect that happens once you build like a bunch of sites in full site editing. Full site editing is like the kind of name for all of these modern WordPress features like global styles, patterns and all that stuff, block themes.
Once you’ve built enough sites in that you kind of realize that like, you don’t need a bunch of block themes because of all the, all the controls and all the styles and everything come from a lot of it comes from WordPress itself. And then all these kind of just like a light style layer. like, you know, it’s kind of opinionated, but not it’s getting paired up or down. So this idea that like, you know, we used to have all these themes that you could drastically change your site. It’s like, I don’t think we really are going to need those. And I think.
once you start building with full-side editing, you realize that where it’s like, I’ll just use Ollie because I can pair it up or down as I need, you know? So it’s kind of a benefit to us, but…
Brian Coords (02:10)
You’re not making ollie for plumbers and ollie for electricians and all of that.
Mike (02:14)
I mean, you can, you can.
I saw, you know, there’s, I see all kinds of people come through Ollie Support and Ollie Slack channel. There’s teachers, there’s people making the most random websites you could imagine with Ollie. And so that’s awesome to see, you know, it’s cool.
Brian Coords (02:33)
Yeah, it’s been an interesting ride. I feel like the last time we talked was, I don’t know, almost a year ago, I guess. It’s been an interesting year in terms of development in the core platform. Do you feel like a lot’s improved in the block theme world?
Mike (02:40)
Probably.
Yeah.
Well, I’ll say that I think a lot this time last year, you know, before things kind of slowed down and got a little wild, I think we were like in a pretty good spot to begin with. And so that that really helped for me. I think there’s a lot of those like just like next level things that would really make the experience better for everyone. I’ve talked about them ad nauseam, responsive controls and better navigation and admin redesign. These things, I think, are the like
Like once you put those in there, then you really can build around this thing, anything you want. You can build your own toolkit around it and then we’re in a great spot. But you know, all things considered, you know, we don’t get a ton of people complaining and all these sports saying like, can’t do this or this or this. Like people always find in WordPress, everyone finds a way to do what they’re trying to do. I think a lot of people, even in this past year with how things have been.
Brian Coords (03:23)
Yeah.
Mike (03:43)
A lot of people are looking at the block editor differently and full-state editing differently than they had maybe the previous six months or a year. I think they’re they’re kind of seeing the power of it and it’s almost undeniable at this point. So I think that helps too.
Brian Coords (03:56)
Yeah.
Yeah, I’ve been trying to pay attention to Reddit a little bit more, just like at work, you get a lot of people there for WordPress. if you want to find like the pulse of WordPress, you’ll go on Reddit. And I like shared recently, like people every week they post, hey, is FSC good? Should I use it? And it used to be like 90 % negative. And now it’s like 50-50 probably. And it’s like half of the people are like, honestly, you can get pretty far with it. It’s a lot easier. You need like 50 less plugins. It’s, know, people are pretty positive.
Mike (04:19)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (04:28)
and somebody was like, no, the people that are negative are just not vocal. And I was like, no, the people that are negative about Gutenberg, they’re pretty dang vocal. So the fact that we’re not hearing them, think, and just negativity in general is more vocal. So the fact that there’s less of it about it, like it’s clearly settling in at a certain level. Yeah.
Mike (04:34)
Hmm. They’re very vocal actually. Yeah.
⁓ Totally.
Mm-hmm. That’s interesting.
Reddit’s not something… I always forget that Reddit exists as like a platform. And then even more so that like there’s like a WordPress community there, but every once in a while I’ll see like in our site analytics, which I rarely check, but I’ll see like a thread from Reddit. Somebody like mentioned Olly and I’m like, wow, I should maybe keep an eye on this thing as platform.
Brian Coords (05:11)
It’s decent, but there’s a lot of AI responses now. Like people just like throw and you’ll still see the bottom where it’s like the end of their, their like responses, like, is there anything else I can help you with question mark, which is like clearly the chat bots response to them and they just pasted it in. So it’s getting a little less valuable, but I do the WordPress and the WooCommerce like subreddit. I’ll like check them once in a while just to see if there’s like things and you know, you, kind of get a sense of like the scope of WordPress when you see Reddit.
Mike (05:16)
Ugh.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
yeah, I mean an interesting use case of AI would be to scrape all those and summarize the things that are going on in there so you didn’t have to dig in and read it all yourself. Just, yeah, that’s good.
Brian Coords (05:51)
Yeah, we are doing some of that ⁓ internally. trying
to figure out, we were tracking like, how can you scrape Reddit for WooCommerce stuff? It’s, yeah, there’s a lot of interesting use cases that you don’t expect.
Mike (06:03)
Yeah, that’s cool. I’ve seen, yeah, you know, we’ve all talked about AI and there’s like the degradation of like commentary with comments or it’s like people can’t even comment anymore. It’s like, like burns my brain or it’s like, and you can kind of, you can see it, like you said, sometimes it’s like the little message at the bottom, like Claude says, Claude can make mistakes. sometimes you’ll see that posted and it’s like, dude, you didn’t even delete that off the end of the thing. It’s like, I don’t know.
Brian Coords (06:32)
Well, the reason I want to talk today is because you launched, as of now, two new free courses on Ollie. So, I mean, I guess what’s the story of that?
Mike (06:39)
Yeah. Yep.
Yep, so I’m sure a lot of people listening to this, maybe or maybe not know Frank Klein, a long time WordPress developer. He worked at HumanMade, he worked at Automatic for a while. He’s done all kinds of stuff in the WordPress space. A few years ago, he made, maybe last year, can remember, a few years ago, made two development courses for WordPress, modern WordPress. So there’s like a block development course and then block theme development course.
And he had them as a paid course for a while, but recently he’s decided to leave the WordPress space and go off and try some new things. And so he reached out to me and was like, Hey, do you want to take these on and kind of keep them? And he’s like, I don’t care if you charge for them or open them up. And I was like, yeah, of course. You know, I thought about it, looked through them and I was like, is this like…
still relevant content, but then I was like, no, these are, because he did a great job of kind of running through sequentially all the things you would need to know about blocks or block themes. And in those videos, there’s a lot of little kind of nuggets that are hard to find if you’re just searching through docs or trying to pull together videos. So to have a coherent course put together, I thought was like incredibly valuable.
To me, was like, obviously I was just gonna open source and put them on the site for free and just make them available to everyone in perpetuity. So yeah, that’s what we did. We took them and it took a long time to upload those and create the posts and do summaries and subtitles. All that stuff had to be done manually. tried, some of it I was able to use AI to do summaries and things like that. But in terms of getting it into WordPress, I had tried different ways of like,
automating it through CLI. so it just was like, it was like the only way to do it was, manually. So I did it.
Brian Coords (08:30)
Did you actually because I remember going through I went through a lot of the free lessons of his because I was kind of just seeing the space and stuff and I like I interacted with him a lot online and my cat keeps attacking me the way and he knows his stuff really well he has definitely the experience he’s really good at teaching and explaining but he’s also I would say more on the advanced side of a
Mike (08:41)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brian Coords (08:55)
development and he’s very opinionated, you know, like he, had very strong opinions of like, this is the right way to do this, this sort of thing. ⁓ did, how did the content sort of align with like your target audience when you actually went through it?
Mike (09:02)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a good point because it is more advanced than the, the Olly end user typically is probably not building their own custom blocks per se. but I think with the theme course that he made, it is developer-y, but there are parts of it where he’s talking through a lot of the interface stuff and how the relationship between a lot of these features with global styles and patterns and how these things kind of play together.
And I think for that reason and with the development, the block course, I was like, no, these are just like, if we’re going to be, Ollie is going to be kind of one of the people out front in this modern space, modern WordPress space. Even if we’re kind of more in the block theme, no code space, I think it’s still valuable to have these as a resource, especially a free one for people to say. like people could say like,
You know, he’s doing it for SEO or traffic. Maybe I doubt I’m going to get much juice from that, but I just thought Olly’s free. A lot of people are using it. We have like 5,000 users. Like this could be great to expose all these people to this, even if it’s like slightly outside of their comfort zone, but at least it’s there and it’s free and they can use it or don’t use it, you know.
Brian Coords (10:21)
Yeah, I mean, think one of the biggest issues with full-site editing is just that lack of information. So, you know, a lot of people in WordPress do start and it just developers in general, they want to start free. They want to play with something they want to learn. They don’t really want to like invest a bunch of money upfront to try something new. So it’s probably just good for the ecosystem. Like even if they don’t end up using Olly, then they, they’re at least joining the ecosystem and that builds kind of like.
Mike (10:34)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (10:48)
extra people to kind of contribute and grow things. also full site editing is weird in that it’s, it’s really appeals to both non-technical users and really technical users. like, I’ll like, I’ll use Olly on my sites, but I’ll still build custom like I’m doing both of it. So it’s kind of like, you know, there’s not like, this is Olly is some sort of like, you know, theme forest theme where you have to like do everything through some janky settings page or something like it’s.
Mike (11:02)
Definitely.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (11:16)
the same tech stack that somebody at HumanMate or Tenup is using for their site, because it’s under the hood, like all the same functionality and extensibility.
Mike (11:26)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and that’s what like, you’re right, it is such an interesting thing, full-site editing, it is both of those worlds. And I don’t feel like we’re still quite seeing the like, really people like exploiting it for what it can do fully yet. You’re starting to see more of it, like you just mentioned Human-Made, you know, I chatted with them at pressconf.
And they’re really like kind of digging into it and building a lot of really cool stuff for it. And that’s important because they’re building sites for like, you know, big time clients. you know, they had a lot of questions for me about, you know, not just Ollie, but like building in this space. So, that that’s a great sign for the ecosystem. And it means that like, they’re seeing, I can dig into this thing and build some really bad ass thing that feels native and something I couldn’t do before. then.
other developers see it and, and do that. But yeah, you’re right as well. It’s like the content out there and there’s like, you know, there’s stuff on the.org and the education site, but there’s still just as like not enough and not high enough caliber of the deep develop, like the modern content, you know, is like very video based and it’s like well produced and all that. We just don’t have a ton of that. And so
It’s bummer, think it does, it’s kind of prevents people from digging in too much.
Brian Coords (12:40)
Yeah, went to build a custom block for someone this weekend, like super simple. And I sat down and I AI, you know, vibe coded this custom block, but I also like very much like set up everything exactly the way I wanted. And I knew like all the terminology to use and I did all that stuff and it, it worked really well other than when I gave it like bad instructions and sent it down rabbit holes. But like it
Mike (12:55)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Brian Coords (13:05)
was really insane to be able to say like, I have an idea for a block and I’m gonna take five minutes with AI versus like build it myself. But it was also extremely simple. Like it was not anything fancy. And I don’t think I would have gotten as far if I didn’t already know how blocks work and how to do it and stuff. I mean, do you think about like AI educating people how WordPress is going and think like, is there, are people…
Mike (13:22)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (13:32)
gonna even need to learn this stuff in the future or is that a concern?
Mike (13:36)
Yeah, you know, it’s a really good question because, um, yeah, AI is, is great at a lot of stuff, you know, um, if you, you’re setting up a block like that and you kind of get it where it needs to be and you’re doing some light touch stuff, it’s like really good at that. Or even just writing like frameworky stuff like PHP or, or react. Uh, it’s great at that because it doesn’t have to dig into the innards of WordPress too far.
to do that stuff. But I’ve found, you know, I was just trying to build a, just out of curiosity, I tried building a custom block recently and it was like a convert kit newsletter block. And it included like writing the block and then I needed to save an API key. So I was trying to tap into the, you know how in blocks you can have like block settings, you can have a sidebar panel. It’s like the one that…
Brian Coords (14:17)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Mike (14:33)
It’s not like the regular sidebar settings. It’s like the one that is like, you’ve got to pin it and whatever that like, it did not know what to do with that at all. Like it totally lost the plot at that point. And from there, it was just making stuff up. Like, and so I think that’s unfortunate because it doesn’t know how to get into that part of WordPress doesn’t know what to do with it. And that wasn’t that deep into WordPress, you know, that was like, you know,
Brian Coords (14:39)
yeah yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike (15:01)
think about like 10 levels of it or five levels of it, that was like level two. And it was like, I don’t know what to do with this. So I think having the context, like you’re saying helps greatly because then like I can get it past that part and it doesn’t have to think about that. And then it can just worry about some other things. But that was concerning to me where it was like, okay, if I’m having trouble with this and I know what’s going on, like this idea that like,
Brian Coords (15:05)
Yeah.
Mike (15:25)
you there’s a lot of people who are saying like, oh, you just feel to like get in there and vibe code it or, um, you know, you won’t need to know this. It’s like, no, you, you probably will. If you want to make some like bad stuff that really like works and feels native and like is maintainable and scalable, you’re going to have to know the underbelly of it. Otherwise, like you’re going to be lost the second it doesn’t work when WordPress seven drops and you’re like, this thing’s busted. So I do think there’s a value to it and kind of goes back to these videos where it’s like,
Brian Coords (15:39)
Yeah.
Mike (15:53)
Yeah, this course is relevant because it gives you a baseline understanding of all this stuff.
Brian Coords (15:59)
Yeah, I definitely like when I built a block, it didn’t do anything fancy. Like it was literally like an input, some numbers and then like show on the front end. So it didn’t have like, usually when somebody’s like, all right, I’m building a site and I need something custom. It’s like, I need some sort of carousel and it needs to like grab posts from the database and it needs to like give them a thing, a post picker. And it’s like all those stuff you would use like ACF or ACF blocks for, and that I don’t know.
Mike (16:15)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (16:25)
what it’s gonna look like. I don’t think somebody’s gonna open their WordPress site and be like, hey chatbot, make me a custom thing. I think most of that stuff that’s low hanging fruit is already solved in the site editor. I can already do a query loop. I can already have good patterns and stuff like that. It really is the harder stuff where you’re like, man, I really need to understand all this ridiculous JavaScript stuff that I used to do in PHP.
Mike (16:37)
Yeah.
Yeah, 100%. Like, you know, you and I, I don’t know if this was last year or the year before, we were kind of talking back and forth a little bit about like a mega menu builder of sorts. Like that is a good example of something where it’s like AI is not going to help you build that really. It’ll help you a little bit, but you have to know how this thing connects to this thing and the template parts work and how this and this and like all these things you have to plug together. Or like the, you know, Olly Pro…
Brian Coords (16:56)
Yeah.
Mike (17:16)
2.0 that we recently released, I was able to use AI to help with a lot of the like UI and kind of moving stuff around and like some data stuff that would be beyond my reach. But knowing the deeper parts of even block themes of how to write a template part to the database and things like that, was just like, couldn’t do it. It didn’t know how to do it. And so, and then like, you understand why, cause then you’re digging and finding.
Brian Coords (17:37)
Yeah.
Mike (17:41)
trying to find the docs yourself and like, I can’t even find anything on how template parts are written in WordPress. So like, no wonder I can’t find it. So yeah, there’s a lot to learn. And I was thinking today, I was like, what can you do to solve that? Can you just like create like your own model that just like feasts heavily and deeply on WordPress and WordPress alone? Is that how you do it? Is it like, I don’t know, what do you think? How do we get past that?
Brian Coords (17:43)
Yeah.
Yeah, we were talking about this internally because when I was building that block, I wanted font control settings in the sidebar. And what I love about like WordPress and blocks, like I want color settings. It’s like, cool. One line of code in my block, Jason, I get all the color settings. It’s all the colors from my theme. Like it’s all like that part. You’re like, yeah, that’s cool. Like super awesome. I want font settings and it starts like making up things and it’s just like making up font options. None of it works. It starts failing.
Mike (18:28)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (18:33)
And then I’m like, I gotta like load the actual documentation and like read it. And it’s not in there because it’s all like experimental. So then you’re like, and I was like, screw it. just like found some old code of mine and was like, how did I do this a year ago? Because I did it before. And like, that’s the route I had to go. And recently we were trying to like at WooCommerce, I did a thing where we like made like AI friendly versions of the docs. So it’s like really lean markdowns that you can just like feed right in.
Mike (18:40)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (19:00)
and it can give it all that context and stuff like that. And then it’s like, we look over at WordPress and you’re like, there’s 20 years of documentation. It’s not really upstate. It’s in like five different locations. It’s in GitHub. in the, a bunch of different like website blogs. It’s all these different places. And I do think like, it’s going to have to become a priority for the, the platform to say like, Hey, this is how developers expect things to work. And it works really well when they go to like other tools.
Mike (19:11)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Coords (19:29)
And all of this stuff is already there. Like the LLM already knows how to write React. And it’s because it’s the documentation. so like documentation and training materials, like aren’t really gonna go away because you still need to create all that stuff and you still need to make it really ingestible. then it’s like, and then you gotta wait for it to get indexed and get into the next model and all that stuff. And so I feel like it’s a long road ahead and like it has to be a priority otherwise.
Mike (19:29)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (19:56)
people are gonna be like, man, this thing can code this, but it can’t code WordPress, and then WordPress has been around for 20 years, and it’s pulling in crappy examples from everybody’s bad websites they’ve built over the last decade. Yeah, it seems like a thing that has to be fixed at the platform level, probably.
Mike (20:02)
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, you’re absolutely right. And I feel like that has been become more clear to me even just in the past, like few months as I’m like experimenting with different code editors and Claude code and cursor and all these different things. It’s like those can get as good as they want and it doesn’t solve this problem really. And so yeah, you know, it is a bummer. I feel like a total
Brian Coords (20:31)
Yeah.
Mike (20:36)
failure when I have to go to the docs for a few reasons. One, feel like I’m like, I feel like at this point I pride myself on like being able to figure out most things without it. but then I have AI and if I can’t get through that and then I have to go to the docs, I’m like super bummed cause I know I’m, I’m going to be on a hunt in the WordPress docs. it’s like, like you said, it’s like, is this going to even work? I ended up going back to my code as well. Cause I’m like, I know this worked at one point and it’s still kind of works.
Brian Coords (20:54)
Yeah.
Mike (21:03)
or at least I can pull that and feed that to Claude to see if it can, it can work with that. it’s almost like you need, you know, yeah, it should be solved at the platform level. And then you almost need like an AI layer between the user and the docs to like, if you need to go to the docs, it should be smarter how I get to the doc that I need instead of an old school, like I’m searching. It should be like, you should be able to cut out.
Brian Coords (21:16)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mike (21:28)
95, 98 % of the things that aren’t relevant show me like exactly what I want these days or very close, like narrow down all the stuff. That would also be really helpful. Again, these are like very difficult problems on a site like .org, you know, which is notoriously, I don’t know, I’ve heard it’s like very difficult to work with kind of a lot of many years of code to work through. So yeah, it’s tough. It’s tough for sure.
Brian Coords (21:34)
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s, I’m sometimes surprised at how AI gets so good, but every other algorithm like search and things like that are still really bad. Like, like, did it, like, how does my, the AI is like can recommend this thing, but like my Apple music that knows everything I listen to is still recommending like bad music. Like they haven’t, like, why is it that I can’t search on Google for this thing, but I can ask it. It’s crazy to me, the, imbalance and stuff, but I think it’ll be, I think it’ll
Mike (22:05)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (22:23)
You know, it’ll wear it’s a it’s a it is relatively new when you think about it in the big picture. And if you ignore the Twitter hype people, you’re like, it’ll it’ll get there slowly, probably.
Mike (22:28)
yeah.
Yeah, it will probably get better. It will be better. It’ll be good enough to solve most of these problems we’re talking about without WordPress having to do too much more on the platform level. Because if we’re honest, like thinking about the effort that that takes to do and fix, I mean, it’s great that we have an AI team and they can figure out how to maybe expose some of this stuff to the models in a more consumable way. That I think is a, that’ll be huge and doable. But some of these other things where I’m like, yeah, I think the…
Brian Coords (22:43)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mike (23:00)
the models will just catch up and hopefully this kind of like in a modern day space race for AI, which is awesome. Like everyone’s trying to like make it better and better and better. And we’re also eating the earth while we’re doing it, but who cares? It’s like getting me to the docs quicker. yeah, so it’s a good thing and a complicated thing at the same time.
Brian Coords (23:18)
How was your process setting up your course? I’m guessing you used full-site editing and Ollie to set up your course and I saw your video looking at Jetpack and stuff. What was the process of, I’m gonna actually build a course in WordPress and not go to Thinkific or some other platform. Did it go okay?
Mike (23:30)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah
my God. Yeah.
Well, you know, Ollie, the site is on, on full site editing. It’s built with Ollie naturally. And I’m also at this point, like I like building in there and I don’t want to jam a plugin in there that looks different and does all these other things that have to learn anything. I just wanted it to feel like just another part of my site. I just go in there. Like I click the post type, the sensei post type, and there’s all my course.
Lessons. So yeah, use sensei, which is a LM, LMS sensei LMS. Yeah, that’s what it’s called. Uh, that’s automatic product. And, you know, I think I mentioned this in that jet pack video is like, I like it because like they build all their products with like a native mindset. And so that is important to me at this point. And that was the most native one I found was like, it just feels like a custom post type in WordPress. And it’s just got all the things around it where it’s like modules.
Brian Coords (24:06)
us.
Mike (24:32)
courses and lessons hierarchy and it was that simple. yeah, just, again, I think each video had over, or each course had over 150 videos in it. So I had to like, you know, I wanted to make sure it was clean and easy to scale as well. So it was like, okay, so I did that. And then I ended up using video press for all the videos so that I could host them somewhere and.
You know, that was a tough thing to decide because was like, you know, I could host them free on YouTube, but then you have to like do a bunch of YouTube embeds and it just was like, it was something. I said yes to the courses from Frank and I was like, well, shit, how do I? I was like, that’s actually going to be a lot of work. And I was like, oh, I’ve already committed at this point. So I did search around a little bit. There’s some other, I can’t remember, like LearnDash and other, these.
Brian Coords (25:04)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike (25:24)
There’s
a lot of them out there these days, but there that’s a lot for what I needed. And I just, you know, I knew these were going to be free and I’m not even letting users register on the site. That was another thing, kind of a prerequisite was like, I don’t, I don’t want people registering on my site for anything. I don’t want a bunch of user accounts on my site in the past. I’ve done that, you know, using WooCommerce and EDD and you have a bunch of, just like, I just want the Olly site to be like a straight up read only, you know, it’s like you go there. so,
Brian Coords (25:33)
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Mike (25:52)
With Sensei, I was able to just open the courses up. You don’t register, you just watch them for free. There’s some things that are saved in local storage, like your progress and things like that, so that’s cool. And yeah, it was relatively low key once I got the tools, then it was just a matter of getting everything into WordPress, which was a process, you know.
Brian Coords (26:11)
There’s like a certain like visual expectation of what a course looks like online. It’s like I want my like sidebar with all of my chapters and lessons and progress and stuff like that. Did you use their designs and stuff or could you use the site editor for that or do you have to go kind of custom?
Mike (26:18)
Yeah.
Yeah, they have, that was another really cool thing I was surprised by is in Sensei, they have some templates that are like full site editing ready. they, the view of the lesson view has its own thing where it’s kind of like full screen. They have the content, they have the sidebar. And so they had like three or four of those layouts, which I thought was really cool.
Me, the perpetual tinkerer, I wanted it to kind of sit in the site a little bit better. I wanted it to of be like our docs in our other video page. So I used their sidebar, which was cool, because it has like the modules and they can open and close and you can kind of make your way down the list. So I took that part and popped it on the sidebar and kind of it sits nicely in the site now. It looks great in there. But yeah, I was surprised because, you know, think Sensei has been around for quite a while and
I hadn’t heard about it or thought about it ever over the past five or ten years. And so when I went to the site and like you can try it like I’m just using the free version of it. I was like, holy shit, there’s actually like decent full site editing support in here. So that was another selling point where I was like, this is the one I’ll just use this thing. So yeah, I was pretty surprised by that.
Brian Coords (27:38)
Yeah, I was setting up some courses and stuff and ended up, I got like the free LearnDash, like license from someone. They were like, try it out. And it was like, yeah, like, I don’t want all this stuff. Like I get why people want all that stuff, but like, if you don’t want all that, but I think it’s a typical WordPress thing where like, there’s either the like completely crazy customized whatever solution that’s like.
Mike (27:50)
Yeah. ⁓
Brian Coords (28:02)
and you know, the UI feels like its own beast inside of WordPress and it’s this whole thing. And then there is Sensei was very much like, I’m just, I’m just adding blocks on a page. That’s it. If I want to add like a quiz, just add a quiz block or whatever, you know, like everything was super minimal. I guess it depends on what you need out of it, but like the fact that you’re serving it publicly and so it’s all cashed, it’s probably like super fast. No one’s logging in and like waiting for your server to load, probably keeping costs down and everything like that.
yeah, that’s probably a smarter way to go. Yeah.
Mike (28:31)
super, super lightweight. Super
lightweight. And I think, you know, to your point earlier, we said like, you know, we’re building custom blocks for things and there’s, I think if you’ve been building in full site editing enough, you eventually find there’s plugins out there that do that thing already. ⁓ And you don’t have to, like, I think that’s important with, if you’re going to dive into full site editing is like making a list of these plugins that
Brian Coords (28:48)
Yeah.
Mike (28:57)
you can like really lean on. Like if you’re gonna be building the full site editing environment, it’s like, okay, well put down Sensei on your list, cause that’s got full site editing support, know? ⁓ Block visibility is tied into that, like the icon block. These things are like native adjacent and they’re like, they fill in the gaps in a way that like you get enough of them, you don’t have to build your own likely. And if you do, maybe it’s just like a light touch one.
Brian Coords (29:06)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I had the issue of like, every time I wanted a custom block, was like, all right, download our 50 block library. And, you know, it was, and then a lot of it was premium and stuff. And I kind of think that I don’t think there’s going to be a huge market for like premium one-off blocks in the future. think that’s kind of, I don’t know, especially when you’re like getting close enough to be able to kind of throw stuff together. And honestly, I did a thing recently where I was like, honestly, I’m just going to throw block visibility on here.
Mike (29:31)
Mm-hmm.
No.
Brian Coords (29:54)
There’ll be a couple extra blocks in the block editor because of some conditional stuff, but the front end will be clean and I have to write any code. I know exactly how it’s gonna work. I can continually tweak it in the editor without opening up a code, without opening the code base. man, it’s, it was pretty good.
Mike (30:00)
Yeah.
yeah.
Isn’t
it cool though? Like, I feel the same way. I’m redoing my personal site, which I should have done a long time ago, but I’m obviously building it with Ollie and full site editing. But yeah, similarly, there’s some things in the editor where I’m like, no, I’ll just hack this thing together so quick. I’m not even gonna write the CSS I could for it. And I’m just gonna use this plugin to do it. And there’s a certain freeing feeling about that where it’s like…
hands off the wheel. It’s like, this is it, baby. This is the future. I’m like, I’m removing myself from this thing and I’m just gonna like, just do it. And I think it’s fine and good and it’ll keep getting better and cleaner. So like in the editor, it looks good too. But you know, right now it’s like, it’s perfectly acceptable.
Brian Coords (30:39)
Yeah.
Have you looked at the, I think like 10 up release, a Figma to, it’s like Figma and it makes your theme JSON, I think, or something like that. And it’s like design stuff. Have you looked at that workflow? Like, cause you have the sort of like design to dev workflow really solid. Have you looked at like the like design mockup to site editor stuff and have like a workflow there?
Mike (31:08)
Yeah.
Yeah, I did. looked at theirs and I think VIP had one too, kind of like a Figma to WordPress token thing. I, you know, I only get so far with them where I’m like, these are more trouble than they’re worth almost. And maybe it’s just my specific setup where I don’t really need that anymore. I think if you are, you know, dealing with big clients like enterprisey kind of clients, I think that workflow makes a lot more sense that you need something like that.
Brian Coords (31:22)
Yeah.
Mike (31:42)
But because Ollie now has, you know, our color palette typography, all that kind of set in stone, I don’t really need to do that. again, from my experience, haven’t been, had success where it’s like, I’m able to get it to like port over exactly how I need to anyway. So right now I just build them by hand and I’m so quick at doing them these days that it’s not that much work to do.
Brian Coords (31:59)
Yeah.
Do you have a roadmap of where you’re going next with Ollie and what hills you want to conquer in the future?
Mike (32:17)
Uh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I got plans, man. No, um, we just, you know, I just spent a quarter doing Ollie pro 2.0, which kind of added that really cool site wizard and, and, uh, the starter sites feature. And that was a big kind of, that was huge. That was a big thing to do. um, I won’t be doing anything big like that, but there’s a lot of little gaps of things. Like I’m going to build kind of a suite of utility plugins. We’re going to got several of them built where.
You can just kind of toggle them on and off and they add little fixes here and there like annoyances like reversing columns on mobile or ⁓ you know, there’s like a, we have a hover colors one. I don’t know if that’s coming to court or not. We might turn that on and you know, if you want to turn it off later, it would be totally clean and easy to do things like that where it’s like the people who are building with Ollie, like I think they’re cool with what’s largely what we’re doing. And it’s just like, how can we keep solving?
Brian Coords (32:55)
Hmm.
Mike (33:14)
those littler problems because we’re coming up on a year of OlliePro in July. And so, you know, I want to like make sure we’re delivering for those people who bought and make sure they feel like they’re getting their money’s worth after all these years and so, or after all these months. there’s that, there’s always the idea of more patterns. There is an interesting problem that happens though with patterns and that like, there’s only so many patterns you can really make to where…
Brian Coords (33:26)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mike (33:39)
If you look at the Olli site now, like we present them almost as they’re called pattern collections, but they’re almost like individual themes and there’s four of them. And if you look at them just like that, you think, well, they only got four pattern collections, but in those pattern collections, there’s like 50 to a hundred patterns each. And because of the way site editing or full site editing works, you can pull those patterns down to your site and consume them onto your page. And they take on the styles of your page. So it’s kind of a little.
Brian Coords (33:56)
Yeah.
Mike (34:07)
trick of the brain where you have to be like, you have to think of all of these patterns as viable options for your site, even if like they’re maybe presented a little different way. like, I want to add maybe some more patterns that like maybe a lot of people want like more blog style and maybe magazine style ones. I’m like a little less interested in that personally. ⁓ They just introduces a lot more complexity. Where now I’m talking to people are asking about query loops and, you know, custom blog posts layouts and it’s like,
Brian Coords (34:23)
Hmm.
haha
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mike (34:36)
But, know, in the same way that people keep asking about WooCommerce, I’m like, they got their own thing coming. You just wait for them, they’re gonna hook you up, and then I don’t have to, you know? I would rather it be solved by WooCommerce because you guys will do it so much better. And so, at least that’s what I hear.
Brian Coords (34:52)
Yeah, it’s,
it’s been interesting to watch that because, you can find, Ellen who’s sort of leading that charge. She’s been on like, she’s in like podcasts and WordCamp talks about it. So I think it’s like all public, but like what she’s basically like, I was like, all right, where’s that WooBlock thing? Because I thought you, I thought you started a while ago, but what she ended up doing was like, like starting with, well, what is full site editing look like for a WooCommerce user? And it’s like, no, there’s like a hundred pain points.
Mike (35:02)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (35:19)
that have nothing to do with the theme, they have everything to do with the experience of, because like the big ones are like the checkout page is block based and the cart page is block based and your product page and queries and stuff. And it’s like, so no matter how good the theme is, because like I like the theme is such a thin layer now on top of it, it’s all the core experience in the editor, which has nothing to do with themes. So she’s been super focused on that, which is much needed. And I feel like that’s the step that.
Mike (35:22)
Yeah.
Yeah.
That’s huge.
Brian Coords (35:48)
kind of needs to happen. I feel like every month somebody tweets like, hey, what needs to happen in WordPress? And we’re all like, hey, I think we already told you. We know. We all know what it’s going to be. We all know what the answers are. We can play this game again, but we all know where the road ends. so having that sort of mentality of like, yeah, the issue is just fixing that user experience in the editor and giving those extra superpowers and stuff, because the theme layer at this point.
Mike (35:56)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Brian Coords (36:15)
All it has to do is turn it on, you know, it’s like, here’s a new support, a new, hey, now I can do border radiuses as a design token. Thank you, turn it on, like that sort of stuff will be super easy. It’s.
Mike (36:17)
Yeah.
Totally. Yes.
And that’s like, that’s exactly the thing how I feel about like with with Ollie on there. It’s like if you turn Ollie on it works pretty good. But the problems with usually the problems that arise between the two are just they’re not Ollie problems. They’re not really WooCommerce problems. They lean more that way. But it’s like yeah, it’s just the gaps. There’s gaps there. And I think filling in those gaps could make it so you turn on Ollie or any other block theme and it’s like
No, it works pretty damn good out of the box because those at the atomic level, it’s fixed and Ollie’s great at working with all of the core blocks and not doing anything too opinionated so that the spacings and panning, all that kind of like will take on those atomic elements in a really nice way. So that would be great if we could do that and open that up for people and people do use it, but I’m always hesitant to take on a…
You know, people are like, I people reach out and say, will you make a WooCommerce pattern collection? And I closed my computer and never came back. No, it’s a lot, it’s a lot because you end up, there’s a lot of edge cases, independencies, once you’re dealing with WooCommerce. And that’s where I’m like, I don’t know. I want to go down that road right now. Maybe if there was a really compelling reason to, but right now I feel hesitant.
Brian Coords (37:35)
Yeah.
I’ve been, is today actually is my fourth month, then my fourth month at WooCommerce. And I didn’t do a lot of WooCommerce before and every, I still turn a corner and see somebody doing a thing with their site where they’re like, well, I don’t need that feature. I need it to like, I don’t need a subscription. I need the subscription to only do it every other month. But then if they buy this other product, it’s And you’re like, everybody has a million weird.
Mike (38:02)
Yes. Yes.
Brian Coords (38:06)
And that’s honestly why they’re on WooCommerce or they’d be on Shopify if they just wanted straightforward commerce. And you’re like, yeah, so I don’t envy anybody on our product teams or Ellen on the theme stuff because no matter what gets shipped, everybody’s gonna be like, well, that’s not my use case. Like, it’s gonna be crazy.
Mike (38:09)
Correct.
Oh yeah, it’s the gift and the
curse of WordPress. I mean, the same is true on regular, even in marketing sites. It’s like, people are like, I want to do this and this and this, but not if it does this. And then you’re like, add e-commerce on top of that. really like exacerbates it. and then, then all of a sudden they’re asking me about these things. It’s like, dude, I don’t know about your script subscription. I’m like, I’m the pattern guy. Okay. Like, uh, uh, so.
But that’s the awesome thing about WooCommerce and that’s why it’s so popular is that like you can bend it and flex it any way you want. It also makes it difficult to kind of improve it and update it in a like really meaningful way I think in the people want. It’s like, no, you have to look at it like WordPress. It’s like, it has to be like small steps to make sure that it can scale and go where it needs to go, you know.
Brian Coords (38:54)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, because we always get people in the comments, they’re like, well, just make it do this. And you’re like, you don’t understand. If we make it do that, this many people, it’s going to break for them. Like every little decision is going to have ramifications and stuff. But I feel like probably, maybe this will be my closing question to you, there’s probably like some general things that everybody wants to see in the next version of WordPress, or like Gutenberg specifically.
Mike (39:20)
⁓ yeah.
Brian Coords (39:35)
I know the admin redesign has been talked about a lot as like a big piece of it. That’s kind of, you know, a clear one, but in terms of like functionality, responsive design, navigation block, if you had to pick one and put all of your resources towards it, which one would it be? Because I feel like those are the two. Those are the two like main stopping points for full-site editing.
Mike (39:38)
Mm-hmm.
yeah.
yeah. You know, as much as I would love to say the responsive block, don’t get people asking me too much about that, which is surprising. think, you know, the people who buy into Olly are, I think, aware of the kind of fluid aspect of spacing and stuff like that, so typography. And so they’re like, they’re kind of okay with that, I think, to some degree, and maybe they’re just, they’re tweaking where necessary. But the navigation block is something that like, is so goofy.
It’s difficult to do and there’s like that view where it goes into the thin bar and then like if you have a sub menu item, it like hides it and then it’s like I have to explain that to people and it just seems like I just I want to be careful here because I don’t want to I’m not knocking anybody but it seems like a totally unacceptable thing that was shipped in a way and that like
Brian Coords (40:26)
thin.
You can’t see it. Yes, I had that today.
Mike (40:47)
When customers come to me and they’re so angry about it, I’m like, I know, I have the same thing. I’m building, you know, I just added a drop menu item to the Olli site the other day. When I added these courses and I was like, I can’t see it. Where is it at? so I get it. so, you know, I think the, the navigation block has a much bigger impact short-term right now. And I think the responsive stuff has a bigger, like long tail benefit to the project to where
we can stop asking that question and we can stop losing people on that issue as well, where it’s like, let’s remove that from the conversation, responsive thing. Let’s just fix it, do it. I’m being a little, you know, glib here. It’s not that easy to just put it in there, but you know, if I can wave a magic wand and be like, let’s do that. And then I feel like we’re where we need to be to build this thing. Admin redesign will come, we’ll get all that stuff. But like, if we get those two things sorted out, we will be in good.
place. What about you? Which one do you pick?
Brian Coords (41:41)
So where,
which one do I pick? I what I really, tried, so I tried to build a mega menu plugin to see if I could do it in the block editor. And one of the first thing I did was add CSS to make the header template part like full screen. I was like, there’s no reason for it to be so thin. And I have to like scroll to see everything. So I need to find that and just like release that as a plugin. like, just make this full screen. Don’t, don’t show me my little header in a tiny little thing.
Mike (41:57)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (42:11)
the edges I hit were really just, it needed to be in Gutenberg. Like there really wasn’t a great way to build a really good mobile menu experience, like mega menu experience inside the block editor without, I think Nick Diego did one that’s like fine, but you gotta like go to template parts and go to this. And it’s like a lot of gluing things together. So I feel like, and I’m not even saying we need mega menus, but it feels like we have a visual editor. So like it should be able to build a visual menu.
Mike (42:28)
Yeah, exactly.
Brian Coords (42:41)
It’s pretty standard what a mega menu looks like these days. think they could, I think it’s feasible. and then I think the other piece is like this idea that like, when you go to add something to your menu and say you want to add a new link to your menu, you don’t just put in the link. You have to find the block that matches the type of link. You’re like, is it a category archive or is it a page? And you’re like, why do I to keep adding blocks inside of blocks that have blocks just like.
Mike (43:00)
Yes.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (43:10)
I added the link just like, let me put in the link. You figure out if it’s a category, you can figure it like, you can tell me if it’s a page, if it’s a category, you can do all that for me. Let me just like say what I want to link to. And I think like that sort of experience of like, let’s just make this a little simpler. think that would, I think, I think that’s the number one thing stopping people from full setting way more than responsive design, even though that’s like the talked about thing. I think the navigation block is a hundred percent the thing that people say like, cause responsive design is everything and people love the block editor and they’ve dealt with it and they’ve.
Mike (43:29)
Yes. Yes.
Brian Coords (43:39)
solved it in their workflow. The full site editing specifically, navigation block is just makes it kind of a non-entry for like a lot of types of sites.
Mike (43:49)
Yeah, yeah, you’re right though, like, I’m not all about mega menus either, but I think if WordPress can build that, it says something, you know? It says like, well, we’re not effing around, like, you can build that if you want to, and that means all these problems will have been solved if you can build that in there. And then I think like, yeah, think that sets a great tone for kind of the rest of your site, because one of the first things people do is
Brian Coords (43:59)
Yeah.
Mike (44:15)
mess with their header. And that’s like one of the first experiences they’re like, this is a colossal bummer, this thing. And so I think we actually lose a good amount of people there. Like people get disheartened. You want like a lot of early wins when you get somebody in something new. You want them to like those confidence building wins. And if you hit the header and you’re like, first of all, you have to figure out that it’s a template part and it’s hidden in the pattern screen.
Brian Coords (44:16)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mike (44:39)
And then you’re like clicking there, you can’t figure out how to get out like that alone is a thing and then you’re trying to mess with the menu. It’s like, yeah, it’s so let’s put some brain power behind that and we’ll be in good spot.
Brian Coords (44:50)
Yeah,
in the e-commerce world, mega menus are, I’ve learned, very popular. Like, showing all your categories and some products and like mega menus are really big for e-commerce stores and that’s, I think, gotta be a huge priority. ⁓
Mike (44:55)
yeah.
Does Woo
have their own, like mega menu solution?
Brian Coords (45:09)
I don’t know, know, I should look into that. I haven’t messed around with the theme side of it and the classic theme. They have like storefront is still like the default WooCommerce theme. And I mean, that theme’s, you know, older than my kids. Like it’s been around. It’s, I mean, obviously that’s why they’re prioritizing the block theme, which is awesome. I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re gonna ever commit to some sort of Megan menu.
Mike (45:18)
Yeah.
ancient yeah that’s crazy
Brian Coords (45:34)
I think that’s the same thing that everybody has, which is like, some things just have to happen in core first. ⁓ And I’m hopeful that like, I think with somebody like Ellen driving like a block theme and she knows the experience she’s done, she’s sold Woo themes in the past, she knows what people want. I think hopefully she’ll be, you know, a good advocate for like solving some of these issues. ⁓
Mike (45:39)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
yeah.
Ellen
is awesome. Love Ellen.
Brian Coords (45:58)
Yeah. Where can people go to take the block theme development course and the block development course, for Molly.
Mike (46:06)
Go to olliewp.com, hit enter, go to the header. In the header, there is a link, a mega menu, I wish. And it’s in the header there, it’s under Docs or Resource, I can’t remember what it’s called. I don’t even know my own website. It’s on there, you’ll see it. It’s under, ⁓ yeah, it’s called the Theme Academy and Block Academy, and they’re both linked on the Docs page, and they’re both free. You can watch them.
Brian Coords (46:14)
Mega Menu.
thought it was like Academy or something.
Mike (46:32)
You might even be able to download them on there. think I marked them for that too. So do what you want with them. Learn if you’re vibe coding. That’s cool, but watch some of these for deeper context so that when you’re deep in the vibes, you can keep vibing because you know where to go. so, yeah, check out Ollie, Ollie Pro, all that’s on there. Check out OllieWP.com.
Brian Coords (46:50)
Awesome. Thanks for hanging out, Mike.
Mike (46:52)
yeah, thanks buddy.