Mike tells me about his extensive journey in the WordPress ecosystem, from a designer to a product builder with OllieWP. We cover the importance of design in WordPress themes, the shift towards full site editing, the value of patterns and pattern libraries, responsive design controls, and more.
Transcript is AI-Generated and may include minor inaccuracies.
Brian Coords (00:00)
Mike McAlister, thank you for joining me. Welcome. Thank you so much. Awesome. Happy to be here. I thought we know each other, but I thought it would be helpful maybe if you could give like your like brief background and bio, because you’re actually kind of like WordPress, you know, royalty at this point or legacy. Yeah, I am tech debt. I am WordPress tech debt at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Yeah. I have been around WordPress a long time. I don’t even know how long.
at least 15 years, and I’ve been making products in the space for a good amount of that time. I started doing like websites like everyone else. And then I was like, there’s this cool thing WordPress I can build on instead of like stat pages. Started using that. And then shortly after that, the kind of theme space blew up. And that was like right up my alley because I was, you know, I’m traditionally a designer. That’s kind of my trade has been forever since high school, you know.
So I, you know, I love design and I love designing websites and all kinds of other things. so when WordPress came along, I was like, Whoa, I can use this as a vehicle to distribute my design to a lot of people instead of like one client at a time, I could put my designs into these templates and they can go everywhere. So at the time, you know, things like theme forest and all these like theme marketplaces were like crazy. So I was on theme forest for a long time. And then they had a, I don’t know if you were around back then, but
They had a bunch of weird pricing changes and exclusivity and all this stuff and license problems. And so I had, at that point I had enough success to be like, I’m going to go solo and go launch my own site. And I launched at the time it was called okay themes. Okay. AY okay themes. Not good, not great. Just okay. And that was good. Yeah. I did that for several years and rebranded to array themes, which probably more people know.
And at that point I was independent and also on WordPress.com and some other things like that. And then in 2018 I sold that and the Atomic Blocks plugin that I was making at the time to WP Engine and worked there for a while. And now I’m building Olly WP, I’m back baby. Themes cannot keep me away. I have wanted something like full site editing for so long. I’ve built themes for so long that I was like, we need something like this. And finally it’s here and I’m building alongside of it. So that’s my story in brief.
You’ve kind of lived like the agency freelance developer’s dream, which is I keep getting paid to build one website at a time and I want to build something that runs on, you know, that 10,000 people will pay me for or whatever, you know, like that’s definitely the dream. So I’m impressed that you made that transition and you were, you were early, I think the first time, right? you’re early this time. Yep. I was early enough anyway to, to.
You know, I think a lot of people were doing stuff back then, but I think my, probably my design style and my design skills put me kind of in a unique place. And it’s, I’ve always maintained that because I always push my design. always like try to like keep getting better at it. And in WordPress, which you probably know, and a lot of people like, there’s not a ton of great design going on. mean, that’s not to discredit many people who are doing some cool stuff, but.
That’s never been the bread and butter. Nobody’s ever looking at WordPress as an industry and being like, you know what they have? Great design. So just having good design myself, I’m able to at least differentiate myself enough to be competitive in this huge market. Yeah, I I run Olly on my personal site because I’m not a designer and I don’t really, like I’ve learned that the hard way of like promising design sorts of things early in my career and then learning like I’m just not good at it. We all, you you started WordPress, you’re like, I do everything.
But I do, that’s actually interesting because I think back to that old theme day where people were selling things and a lot of times themes were a ton of functionality. So was like, have a grid builder and a slider and a blah blah blah and it was all of that sort of stuff. And you differentiated on design specifically. Did you still have to put in all that functionality back then? All those add-ons? What did you do for that stuff?
No, I was such a pain in the ass in that I refused to do any of that. They were the like the, most in the same way that Ollie is just like entirely native. Back then it was like the themes that I was making were just entirely clean and native. They didn’t do a bunch of stuff. They just looked good. And then if you wanted to plug your own stuff into it, that was awesome. But I just tried to keep them as simple as possible because again, back then and still true now I’m like very small operation. was only a one man operation.
forever until I did Ali and I have a co-founder, Patrick, with that. So, you know, back then it was like, even though I was doing some big numbers, it like I was the only one doing support and building these things. the more you add onto a theme, the more functionality you put in, the more sliders you add, it’s just their support nightmares and headaches and everything else. So yeah, back then it was just, the ethos was very similar to this. Now it’s like super clean and to core, and that’s pretty much it. Okay, because I was also thinking like,
That was what people paid for also a little bit. sometimes people bought these themes because they wanted all that functionality. And now full site editing has a lot of the, I mean, it’s even just the block editor just has like 90 % of the fancy things you need for most layouts. So like you’re not providing that. You really are now just providing design and nothing else. Unless, I don’t know, do you see like other like
Do you see like cadence in those sorts of like block based like theme builders as like competitors or like in your same zone or are those different tools or how do see those? I guess they are. I have always, you know, like I just said, I’ve kind of always just done my own thing, even in the era of the mega page builders and the mega themes and all that stuff. I had enough of an audience on the side in my own little pocket to do my own thing and not think about those ever. It just was like, no, I’m the guy you come to if you want the other stuff.
And there’s enough people on WordPress where you can do that, can niche down and find your pocket. And so I kind of missed the cadence and everything revolution. And when full-side editing came, I just went straight to that and I was like, no, I can build into this. I know the model works from my old theme days that there is enough people that want, that don’t want those kinds of things. And as you know, there’s like,
There’s so many different personas in WordPress. Like there’s a builder persona that wants and needs that kind of tool, cadence and generate blocks and that stuff, because they’re generating things. But then there’s like hundreds of thousands of people a day installing WordPress themselves and they’re looking at full site editing, pure full site editing and the block editor and a block theme and they don’t know anything about cadence or generate blocks or anything like that. So.
They’re looking at the kind of system that I have decided to buy into and build alongside and build for. So that’s kind of where I’m at. And again, I think, especially as a small operation, if WordPress now has almost all the tools you need to build out a decent website built into WordPress and all the design tooling and everything, I’m investing there. I’m almost 40 years old. I don’t have the time or the energy. I have a one-year-old at home like…
I’m not building a page builder. I’m not doing that. WordPress has done it and there’s some shortcomings for sure, but it’s like, even if it’s 75, 80 % there, that’s amazing. That’s like 75, 80 % I don’t have to build and the rest we can polish and fix up. So yeah, that’s where I’m at. Yeah. That’s how I feel sometimes when I look at these tools. Like obviously I understand the value of them. I never worked in a place where we used a lot of page builders. So to see
like Cadence and Generate, which are basically page builders inside of Gutenberg, where you can tweak every single like margin spacing at every break point, all these sorts of things. Sometimes like I’m the kind of person where, like on my site, if it’s like, I like small, medium and large spacing, and I really don’t care. Like I don’t need to get that granular. Like that’s good enough for me. I think it like solves my problem. So I’m like probably the perfect use case where I’m like, I know if I,
needed to, could write some CSS and I could do all this sort of stuff. But I kind of like the simplicity that you’re still have where it’s like, no, there’s just like four spacing sizes and I don’t care that they’re going to be responsive enough. Like I don’t want all the bells and whistles. So, I mean, I guess I’m sort of weirdly your target audience, even though I technically know how to do all those things, but like he’s your audience. Like, do you think they’re more like building websites for other people or you get a lot more like building websites for themselves?
less technical kind of users. It’s a blend for sure, which, you know, in launching Oli and Oli Pro, we, you know, we weren’t sure who we were going to get because this is like a whole new era of WordPress. And there’s a lot of people who, at least if you, you know, read the tea leaves on the internet, which should never do. There’s just so much complaint and this, this and that or whatever. But then we launched it and we’re like, okay. So tons of people are ready to use it. Different kinds of personas from like.
you know, like teachers building sites for their classrooms. And then the really surprising thing was we launched with two pricing plans and we were immediately met with a bunch of questions from like agency folks who were like, we need, we need more installs that more activations. And that was very surprising because you know, everything we learned about, I learned about agencies working in WP Engine was like, they don’t love change. It’s expensive time, time consuming and adding new tools. It’s, it’s a lot of work, but
No, they were, many of them were like ready and like, I think for them, you can see the value. It’s like, okay, well we can get rid of the dependency of a lot of these tools, maybe just build our own thing around the 75 % that’s there. And so we actually have a very like even distribution of sales across our different plans and in support, I see all kinds of personas. you know, it’s kind of.
great in a way to have a diversity of personas. It’s also as a product person and trying to dial in a product, it’s like the worst thing ever. You want like a hero customer that you’re building for. But I think also it does make sense with Oli Pro because we’re just providing, it’s like a design library. And it’s not like a pro tool for builders. It’s designed for people like you. It’s designed for the lady who’s building a website for a classroom or whatever. So it’s just design.
and design is fairly universal as a tool. So I think that makes sense. Yeah, and in my agency experience, we didn’t use a lot of page builders. also didn’t use a lot of… We always hated when a client came with a stock theme and said, can you make this theme forest theme do X, Y, and Z? it’s like, you knew it was going to be more work to do that than to build it yourself. But I also think we often had…
a very specific design. So for us, it was like, all right, we need to make this match this exact design. Whereas like that situation where you’re like, I don’t, I’m not trying to match a design. I just want to, I just want it to look good. I want it to look like somebody designed it, even though nobody designed it or like designed my specific website. So that makes sense. Like, also, you know, you were saying like, it’s hard to maintain like a huge library of like gadgets and gizmos inside your theme. And I feel like we are seeing that.
a little bit with like the block editor where it’s like, they just have so many cool things, but all of them need like a month focus of like, they need like a team of developers on each one, like finishing them or something like that. Yeah, just finish. So it’s like, now you’ve shifted the burden of that to where like, whatever, like your fate is really tied to the block editor’s like ability to deliver. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like, you know, small teams and
Indie product makers, they move fast as hell because there’s no limitations. They just ship the thing they want to ship. They build it, they ship it. But like it’s awesome to have it all in core, but then you’re at the kind of the way things ebb and flow in core, which there’s a lot going on and there’s priorities and though sometimes the most important thing to you is the last thing on people’s list. So, you know, it’s, it’s tough, but you’re right. There’s it’s, it’s so powerful and there’s so much stuff in there, but like
Like many people have said, like one whole cycle of just like fit and finish would really like do a lot for people. you, are there like specific? Well, actually I don’t want to back up. When you design, say you’re going to design a new set of patterns, cause you have, what do you call like the, the pattern, like the themes of patterns that you have? Collections. Collections. You have like creator and what are the other? Startup.
and studio. Okay. When you go in and you’re like, all right, say I’m going to make a new one or I’m going to add on those. Do you start in the editor or do you start in like Figma or a Figma tool? Yeah, I do everything in Figma first because I provide the Figma files as well. So a lot of people love that. They love to be able to get in there and take the patterns and do what they want with them. And I’m also, you know, I’ve done the design of the browser era of my life.
And I just find that I do much more interesting design in Figma because I can move quick, can iterate, I can do… When you’re doing it in the editor, you’re kind of boxed in already. So you’re designing inside a box, inside a box. And so you’re designing within constraints. I would rather design it in Figma, knowing everything I know about WordPress and the constraints therein. I’ll design it there with that in mind and have the freeform nature of Figma, get the design done. And then when I go to put it in WordPress,
I have the design done, the colors picked out, typography’s all scaled out. I have the sample content for all the patterns is already in there. It just saves me a ton of time to start in and work for us. you ever make a design in Figma and you’re like, I don’t know that I can do this in the block editor. And not only that, like it’s one thing to make a design in the block editor. It’s another thing where you’re making a design, but it has to still be editable by other people in the block editor.
in an intuitive way, you can’t just like, I just put classes on everything and I have a bunch of CSS over here that you can’t over. Like you kind of can’t do that as much. Do you ever get to a place where you’re like, I thought I could do this and I can’t, or is it usually doable? Just like just sometimes I usually design it confidently knowing it can be done. Like I said, I’ve, I’ve made hundreds of patterns at this point with all native core, core native blocks. So I.
very much know what can and can’t be done. There’ll be things when I’m in like, I’m in the mode looking at the matrix code falling in Figma and I’m like, that’d be cool if I could do this. And so I’ll design it out. then actually I’m working on a new pattern collection right now. And there’s a thing in there that I’ve included that I’m not sure if it will work or not, because like you said, you can do a lot in there, but is it intuitive for somebody to go in there and change it? That’s the other thing. It’s like, has to be changeable easily. So.
Generally speaking, I design it with all of that in mind so that I don’t paint myself in a corner. And again, I’m all about like, I gotta move quick and efficiently. I think people, if you were to look at the Figma files that I’m designing, never think that these were designed with constraints of a content editor in mind. And I think that’s the trick. That’s the kind of the value that the Oli Designs kind of provide is like.
They look great and they’re designed super well and when they hit the page they look awesome. And they tie entirely into all of the tooling in WordPress. They’re not constrained by anything. yeah, it’s taken many, many years of doing themes to know how to do that. And yeah, that’s where we’re at. Yeah, and it’s interesting, like you’re talking about building patterns, because like, feel like patterns have become so important in WordPress and in Gutenberg.
where you can tell that maybe they were surprised by that. I feel like they didn’t realize that that was going to be such an important central feature that everything else is based on, and they’re kind of catching up to it. But I don’t know, to me it feels like patterns are the central game-changing feature that really, for most people, unlocks, like, OK, now I get why people would want to use this block editor to begin with. yeah.
Patterns are kind of a universal thing across these site editors now everywhere. They’re kind of pre-designed content. And before we had patterns in WordPress, back when I was working at WP Engine, my coworker, John Paris and I, years before, this was shortly after the block editor came out and there was just like not great tooling. We built a prototype of patterns and it was called, we call them sections and layouts. It was just like section page, page sections and then full page layouts.
And they ended up using that when patterns came around, they used that as the prototype. had our screenshots of our thing and the big pattern kind of ticket. And it was like, cool. We kind of like pseudo invented patterns. Not that they wouldn’t have gotten there because it’s such an obvious use case for the site editor that they had to get to patterns some way somehow. But yeah, I saw enough value to be like, yeah, I’m building a whole business around that. Olly is it’s patterns. It’s a pattern library.
and styles and typography, all that stuff, it’s all delivered through patterns. Yeah, and it feels like the next big thing, to me at least, think is gonna be these sort of cloud pattern libraries or ways to, there’s this cool thing with the block header where you can take a pattern from one of your, like the creator pack in Oli, that’s very designed very differently, but as soon as I pop it into my site, which already has all my brand colors and everything like that,
suddenly it looks exactly like the rest of my site. And it’s like the way that they’re super composable and you can move them back and forth. And it feels like that concept of pattern management, cloud pattern libraries. And the thing that Oli has that I honestly, once I was using this, was like, how is this not a thing in core? But you have a custom, it’s basically a custom block where if I’m working, I can start typing the word pattern.
And then all these like pattern library opens up and I can like pop a pattern right there. And the idea that in core, actually can’t, there’s no keyboard shortcut to just get to patterns. You have to like click three different like mouse clicks to get to pattern. But you guys have this like literally like I’m just typing, I can type in slash pad and like all the pattern manager opens up. I can dig through all the patterns, but like this whole idea of like, I can pull in patterns everywhere. Patterns will be shared. Patterns will be probably across multiple sites.
so that I could build it on my staging site and then pull the pattern in on my live site or something like that. I mean, is that where you think all of these are go or like at least tools in WordPress would go? Yeah, so from the very beginning of this, before I had even linked up with Patrick Posner, I had kind of started prototyping out what I thought a cool new WordPress company could be around this stuff. And when we met, we just kind of shared notes. We had like the same exact notes, which was awesome. That’s what you want in somebody who’s gonna partner with you.
From the very beginning, we had this idea that there was going to be two-way patterns libraries. So users can download patterns from our cloud, which is currently what you can do. But the idea was that you would be able to create your own patterns and push them up to the cloud. And then you log into your other site. Maybe you create your own set of patterns that you love to start with. You log into a different site, you pull those in and you can continue to customize them. We’ve seen a few companies doing this now. I Cadence maybe does it in their own way.
We’re, we actually built out the interface for it already. That’s what we use to publish patterns to the cloud. So it already kind of works in that way. We’re just waiting for a few more things on our end and from core to feel like we want to like, cause once you push something out there like that, that’s, it’s kind of a big deal. Pulling patterns to your site is not a huge deal, but pushing them up is like a whole different ball game. And we want to make sure that we’re ready to do that. But.
Yeah, I think that’s the idea. that’s, again, this is not some kind of secret sauce or anything. Our differentiation will be in how we pull it off and how intuitive it is and, you know, all the, all of that stuff. But I think other companies will follow suit in a way because the model kind of just works for patterns as, sort of consumable parts of your site. Like you said, and especially now patterns are
They’re getting even more powerful with sync patterns. And that’s not the end of it. We’re to see more, more kind of intelligent things around patterns and typography and stuff. What kills me is like people look at WordPress like it is now and they’re complaining as if in five years from now, this shit isn’t going to be awesome and do all the stuff that we can’t even imagine. It’s, that’s where I have always pointed to and said like, we’re building for now and two years from now and two years from then and from then.
And just banking on the idea that this thing gets better with my help and your help and everyone’s So yeah Yeah, I keep looking at like the most upcoming release and really though the really 2024 as a whole and like what was WordPress trying to accomplish with 2024 like what were the things that were clearly priorities because there’s it’s definitely was a year of I Was hoping for a year of cleanup the UI
But it was definitely a year of building under the hood APIs like block bindings and things like that. And you see little bits of it like in like synced patterns, which is like a user facing feature, but under the hood, like this next release, there will be no physical changes to synced patterns, but the API underneath it is like, has like moved another like a hundred yards. Like it’s, definitely.
Improved a lot, but it’s not user facing it and that’s kind of the theme of this whole year is like WordPress has done a lot of stuff under the hood that I think is not as exciting or visible or usable yet, but like you can see okay, let’s be realistic It’s a couple years away, but like it’s getting there and it’s like the things are there and I think Patterns pattern development all that sort of stuff is a priority. I don’t think
design controls to the level people want are going to be as much of a priority, I don’t, you know, I don’t know. Are you, do you have an opinion on responsive design controls in WordPress? I think the, it’s so tough because there are parts of the old way of building websites that I’m totally over. I don’t need to actually, you know, I’ve built websites every different way you could possibly do it. And there is something refreshing about leaning on, like you were saying earlier, fluid spacing and stuff like that, that’s in there and, just.
just chucking all that other stuff out and just like, let’s just build websites quick that are like fast and flexible. But there always is a wall that you hit where it’s either custom CSS or particularly if you’re building for a client and they send you a Figma file that has a very specific design, you’re like, I can’t do this in the block editor. I’m going to have to rewrite some stuff. I don’t know that responsive controls really fixes that part, but there’s like, you know, the
the massive mound of people who are asking for it and feel like they can get some value out of it. And the kind of more recent models I’ve seen about using the device preview to sort of do those fine-tune controls, I think that’s fine. And I don’t think that’s something we need to philosophically oppose in WordPress and take some kind of stance to say we can’t do it because intrinsics like…
the new way of life. I don’t know, I don’t necessarily believe all that. It’s a lot of work and it’s hard work, but it’s not impossible to do these things. It’s just priority, like you saying earlier, whether or not they think it’s priority and who dictates how these things end up in there. I don’t know anymore. It’s kind of fuzzy, if they do something responsible control wise, I think it would be valuable and I think it would help ease the conversation of a lot of people who are saying like,
I can’t build in WordPress anymore because of these small things. And that’s a big one that everyone points to and says, I can do this in Webflow. It’s like, well, let’s just get rid of that part of the conversation and bring those developers back in. And maybe it takes little things like that here and there to keep the kind of ecosystem going, you know? Yeah. It’s funny because I have opinions about priorities in Gutenberg. And one thing that I was not really a huge fan of was the zoom out mode where it kind of zooms you away.
I thought, that’s kind of cool, but like so low on my priority list of other things where I’m like, feel like whoever was working on that, thank you. But like, man, it would have been really nice to just hit these other things. And then today I was actually working with a client and we were looking at their homepage and they wanted to move some sections of around and be like, actually this needs to be more featured and this needs to be less featured. And in that moment I thought, man, actually if I had this mode right now, it would be super handy in this call with this client. And it was.
Just like a good reminder of like, damn, you know, no matter what you think is the priority, it’s like every week I change my mind on what I think is a priority. And I just have to like, stay, like you said, stay away from like the, the, the noise sometimes of, of our guys. I do, yeah, responsive really does feel like at least some sort of a little bit of a like, yeah, you can kind of move some things around or, or a little bit more control over how things stack and where they stack maybe.
just some little tiny things like that would probably help. Yeah, just starting with those smart things. It’s like things you know 100 % are gonna need to change on mobile, like stacking order and things like that. They can even start small and just slide little things in, whatever, I don’t know, but I agree. Yeah, centering your text on mobile is like the most common one we get asked. all Everything goes centered on mobile. I’m actually just curious, when you build…
all of your patterns and everything like that. Do you have, you must have some level of like a, almost like an agency would have a workflow for like version control, for tracking changes, for like saving, branching, trying different things, not losing all your work and stuff. Cause I think everybody struggles a little bit with like, it’s all just HTML floating around somewhere and it might disappear. Did you guys have to build any of that out or, or did you find a system for that?
no, not really. We, cause I do like the source of truth design wise is always in Figma. That’s where the design lives. Then when I build them in for like production, I build them on our cloud site. Basically it’s like a WordPress site where they live. We build them and then we push them to a Postgres database at Superbase. And that’s where they’re delivered from. So the site, the WordPress site that I build them on and all this kind of stuff is the media is stored.
is just, it’s just version controlled via backup. So I don’t have each pattern like GitHub or something like that. I’m trusting the system of WordPress and how it is and world of backups. And because they exist on the WordPress site and in our cloud, there’s some kind of backup system there. So it’s pretty low key and I don’t feel the need to change it too much based on it’s pretty low stakes for us.
Yeah, because once you release a pattern into the cloud library, do you guys ever have to go back and change them? Like a new feature comes out. I remember Box Shadows was not around, and now Box Shadows is around. Do you go back to the old ones and throw those things in, or do you have to leave them to support older sites? Or how do you deal with those? No, we just do it and I’ll put it in there. I’ll go into the live site. I’ll change it in there.
click publish and it automatically pushes up to the cloud and then it’s instantly available to a user to download. don’t have to update the plugin or anything like that since it’s all in the cloud. They can immediately start using it. And if I think if you have like a box shadow call on a pattern and you don’t have that on your site, it’s just in the markup. I don’t think it actually busts or anything like that. So then what are you guys working on next? What’s your next big, ollie, exciting thing?
Next big thing is I’m almost done with another collection and this one’s pretty cool. It’s much bolder and colorful and all that stuff. And so I’m almost done designing it and then I’ll convert them to patterns, which usually doesn’t take too long. I’ve gotten pretty good at that part. And then, then I’m going to pivot to back to the setup wizard that we started with.
Two years ago, a long time ago, it caused the internet to shut down for a few days. Infamous setup wizard. I like, I needed a PR team in that small amount of time. They don’t do PR teams in WordPress. No, they don’t. We just give you the Twitter handle and you get to go crazy. Yep, that’s right. We built a setup wizard, it was really cool. I had done this cool stuff, but it was very kind of blunted by the process that we tried to go about it.
So that exists in Oli Pro, but now that we have all of these pro assets, these patterns, these styles, and kind of a better handle on how people are using it, I wanna revisit that and rework it with that in mind so that you can do cool things like not just setting up a site with like pulling in a pattern collection and styles, but if you’re a builder, you might want to build your own theme or a child theme and just pull in these different assets, click a button and get that deliverable and all these cool things.
Luckily, we already have this thing largely built out because we already built it. And so it’s just like refreshing it with some of this stuff in mind. And then I think Q1 next year will probably be looking at the cloud thing, like letting users publish their own patterns into the cloud. I want to chat with some people first. think again, that’s such a big lift. I want to understand how people use that and if they’re actually going to use it.
Because if there are other ways where people are like, nah, I just want to like do it through version control or something else. I want to understand that problem deeply before I go and try to like spend all this time and money on a problem that nobody really has. Yeah, because I remember Beaver Builder did a similar thing. They had a tool they released where you could take your Beaver Builder like templates and they would, you’d save them in your cloud and then you could go to other sites and pull them down and stuff like that.
I don’t know how much it was used. It might be one of those things that everybody thinks they want, but then they don’t end up using, which is the worst place you can find yourself in. it also might not. I’ve been doing some other sites that I want to match my main site’s branding. I mean, is, honestly, I can literally open one site and copy a pattern and paste it. So it’s not that hard of a problem. But yeah, maybe that would have been helpful.
Yeah, that’s a good question. That just reminds me, how come you don’t do child themes? What was the decision on that? That’s funny. I was just listening to a little thing today about child themes and kind of gave a few comments on that. I think with what is possible now in WordPress, think a lot of people don’t need child themes, but then there are still, we still have plenty of people who use them. They want to customize the theme and bulletproof those changes. They don’t want to mess around in the database and I have to…
move the changes from here to here and all this stuff. So they just lock them in a child theme. They conversion control it and do whatever they want. Kind of best of both worlds. In terms of Ali and the pattern collections, we just didn’t need to really because the kind of the beauty of WordPress now is that the value is all in these design tools that are already in core, right? And the kind of the way the colors and typography and all of that in a theme JSON, the way that maps to
tools dictates that like you don’t need child themes, you can just use styles, which is all like the pattern collections we have in Oli Pro are just all patterns, but they are pulling from different styles. So the startup collection pulls from the startup styles. But the cool thing is you don’t have to use that. You can take all those patterns and flip it over to the studio style or the agency style. And you get like thousands of combinations that you can like, you know, mix and match.
You couldn’t really do that with a child theme. Well, you could, it would just be, I know, I feel like it’s just more of a headache. I just feel like we didn’t need to. so I just prefer to kind of keep it this way. And also I think it leans more into this kind of new wave of full-site editing and style swapping and things like that. Yeah, I’m like, I actually make a child theme of Ollie, but you’re right. Like if I started with a child theme of like creator, then like.
how would I get patterns? It would almost segment everything too much if every collection was its own child theme and then you wouldn’t get to have the freedom of mixing and matching. But I do have a child theme only because I’ve added some theme.json stuff. And I do think it would be nice to see some way for you to add some styles to patterns, not just in the UI. If you’re like, I want bold headings here, but now I use that pattern.
on my site headings aren’t bold, there’s something else. now it’s like, there are some little things like that that would be nice to see that all like a little bit more composable than they finally got. I’d like to get in there. that makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s kind of how I’m seeing like customers, that’s kind of some of the stuff they want. yeah, I think we’ll get to that point too. Yeah. So yeah, thanks for talking and like where should people go to sign up?
Where should people get all the, should people get all the, should I tell them not to? Just kidding. don’t know. It’s up to you people. You know, this is the era of do what you want. I think it’s pretty cool. I think it’s one of the more interesting things in WordPress. And I tried to say that subjectively or objectively. mean, because yeah, just, there’s not a ton of super exciting stuff popping off right now. But I think we’re showing people kind of maybe what it’s like to build a modern day WordPress company and what it looks like to build alongside WordPress.
as the main product and we’re just kind of like sprinkling in the value where we can. And I think that’s a kind of a cool model. And I think that’s probably more where we’re going for WordPress products these days, instead of building a giant entity and trying to like bolt it on to WordPress and say like, this is my thing. It’s, I don’t know. I feel like users are over that, that kind of whole Herculean product thing and just, want websites. They don’t want all this junk. They just want websites. So if you are interested in what I just said,
and all this past half hour of talking, you can go to ollywp.com and you can try Olly for free. That’s a block theme. You can use it just totally free. It’s got a bunch of patterns in it. And then if you want a little bit more, if you want to get fancy and get a little saucy, you can get Olly Pro and add some, bunch more patterns to your site and build some really cool stuff. And we have videos and all that other stuff too. And I’m on Twitter still and I’m going down with the ship. I don’t have any other time.
I did create a Blue Sky account, then I got over and I was like, what the hell am I doing over here? don’t have time for this. I can’t start all over. Exactly. was like, what am I doing here? So I’m still on X Twitter and find me there, Mike McAllister. I think I’m one of a few. Yeah, I think you’re actually right because I was in a client site today where they have some sort of donation thing and it went from short codes the last time I logged in to this time they layered their own builder.
thing on top of it that’s like, doesn’t look like anything in WordPress. It’s like, you know, this, it’s like, I won’t say which, who owns it or what plugin, but it’s like a known, it’s, it’s not, it’s a known company. It’s the plugins not as known, but the company is, but like, it was just kind of like, people really are excited about being close to core. And it’s like, I use your theme and I use a block from this and I use a block from this and it’s little teeny pieces. And I didn’t have to install a giant thing on top of it. And it all works together. And it’s like, when you see that happening in real life, it’s really exciting.
when you use some plugin where they built their own stupid thing on top of it, it’s really unflicking and breaks you out of your workflow. So yeah, if you’re in like the close decor world, you should be experimenting with all these other full-sided editing themes and you should be arguing with us on Twitter because that’s the WordPress arguing is happening. All day, every day for the past 10 years and probably for the next 10 years. So get in while the water is warm. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, you bet, man. Thanks for chatting.
Brian Coords (00:00)
Mike McAlister, thank you for joining me. Welcome. Thank you so much. Awesome. Happy to be here. I thought we know each other, but I thought it would be helpful maybe if you could give like your like brief background and bio, because you’re actually kind of like WordPress, you know, royalty at this point or legacy. Yeah, I am tech debt. I am WordPress tech debt at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Yeah. I have been around WordPress a long time. I don’t even know how long.
at least 15 years, and I’ve been making products in the space for a good amount of that time. I started doing like websites like everyone else. And then I was like, there’s this cool thing WordPress I can build on instead of like stat pages. Started using that. And then shortly after that, the kind of theme space blew up. And that was like right up my alley because I was, you know, I’m traditionally a designer. That’s kind of my trade has been forever since high school, you know.
So I, you know, I love design and I love designing websites and all kinds of other things. so when WordPress came along, I was like, Whoa, I can use this as a vehicle to distribute my design to a lot of people instead of like one client at a time, I could put my designs into these templates and they can go everywhere. So at the time, you know, things like theme forest and all these like theme marketplaces were like crazy. So I was on theme forest for a long time. And then they had a, I don’t know if you were around back then, but
They had a bunch of weird pricing changes and exclusivity and all this stuff and license problems. And so I had, at that point I had enough success to be like, I’m going to go solo and go launch my own site. And I launched at the time it was called okay themes. Okay. AY okay themes. Not good, not great. Just okay. And that was good. Yeah. I did that for several years and rebranded to array themes, which probably more people know.
And at that point I was independent and also on WordPress.com and some other things like that. And then in 2018 I sold that and the Atomic Blocks plugin that I was making at the time to WP Engine and worked there for a while. And now I’m building Olly WP, I’m back baby. Themes cannot keep me away. I have wanted something like full site editing for so long. I’ve built themes for so long that I was like, we need something like this. And finally it’s here and I’m building alongside of it. So that’s my story in brief.
You’ve kind of lived like the agency freelance developer’s dream, which is I keep getting paid to build one website at a time and I want to build something that runs on, you know, that 10,000 people will pay me for or whatever, you know, like that’s definitely the dream. So I’m impressed that you made that transition and you were, you were early, I think the first time, right? you’re early this time. Yep. I was early enough anyway to, to.
You know, I think a lot of people were doing stuff back then, but I think my, probably my design style and my design skills put me kind of in a unique place. And it’s, I’ve always maintained that because I always push my design. always like try to like keep getting better at it. And in WordPress, which you probably know, and a lot of people like, there’s not a ton of great design going on. mean, that’s not to discredit many people who are doing some cool stuff, but.
That’s never been the bread and butter. Nobody’s ever looking at WordPress as an industry and being like, you know what they have? Great design. So just having good design myself, I’m able to at least differentiate myself enough to be competitive in this huge market. Yeah, I I run Olly on my personal site because I’m not a designer and I don’t really, like I’ve learned that the hard way of like promising design sorts of things early in my career and then learning like I’m just not good at it. We all, you you started WordPress, you’re like, I do everything.
But I do, that’s actually interesting because I think back to that old theme day where people were selling things and a lot of times themes were a ton of functionality. So was like, have a grid builder and a slider and a blah blah blah and it was all of that sort of stuff. And you differentiated on design specifically. Did you still have to put in all that functionality back then? All those add-ons? What did you do for that stuff?
No, I was such a pain in the ass in that I refused to do any of that. They were the like the, most in the same way that Ollie is just like entirely native. Back then it was like the themes that I was making were just entirely clean and native. They didn’t do a bunch of stuff. They just looked good. And then if you wanted to plug your own stuff into it, that was awesome. But I just tried to keep them as simple as possible because again, back then and still true now I’m like very small operation. was only a one man operation.
forever until I did Ali and I have a co-founder, Patrick, with that. So, you know, back then it was like, even though I was doing some big numbers, it like I was the only one doing support and building these things. the more you add onto a theme, the more functionality you put in, the more sliders you add, it’s just their support nightmares and headaches and everything else. So yeah, back then it was just, the ethos was very similar to this. Now it’s like super clean and to core, and that’s pretty much it. Okay, because I was also thinking like,
That was what people paid for also a little bit. sometimes people bought these themes because they wanted all that functionality. And now full site editing has a lot of the, I mean, it’s even just the block editor just has like 90 % of the fancy things you need for most layouts. So like you’re not providing that. You really are now just providing design and nothing else. Unless, I don’t know, do you see like other like
Do you see like cadence in those sorts of like block based like theme builders as like competitors or like in your same zone or are those different tools or how do see those? I guess they are. I have always, you know, like I just said, I’ve kind of always just done my own thing, even in the era of the mega page builders and the mega themes and all that stuff. I had enough of an audience on the side in my own little pocket to do my own thing and not think about those ever. It just was like, no, I’m the guy you come to if you want the other stuff.
And there’s enough people on WordPress where you can do that, can niche down and find your pocket. And so I kind of missed the cadence and everything revolution. And when full-side editing came, I just went straight to that and I was like, no, I can build into this. I know the model works from my old theme days that there is enough people that want, that don’t want those kinds of things. And as you know, there’s like,
There’s so many different personas in WordPress. Like there’s a builder persona that wants and needs that kind of tool, cadence and generate blocks and that stuff, because they’re generating things. But then there’s like hundreds of thousands of people a day installing WordPress themselves and they’re looking at full site editing, pure full site editing and the block editor and a block theme and they don’t know anything about cadence or generate blocks or anything like that. So.
They’re looking at the kind of system that I have decided to buy into and build alongside and build for. So that’s kind of where I’m at. And again, I think, especially as a small operation, if WordPress now has almost all the tools you need to build out a decent website built into WordPress and all the design tooling and everything, I’m investing there. I’m almost 40 years old. I don’t have the time or the energy. I have a one-year-old at home like…
I’m not building a page builder. I’m not doing that. WordPress has done it and there’s some shortcomings for sure, but it’s like, even if it’s 75, 80 % there, that’s amazing. That’s like 75, 80 % I don’t have to build and the rest we can polish and fix up. So yeah, that’s where I’m at. Yeah. That’s how I feel sometimes when I look at these tools. Like obviously I understand the value of them. I never worked in a place where we used a lot of page builders. So to see
like Cadence and Generate, which are basically page builders inside of Gutenberg, where you can tweak every single like margin spacing at every break point, all these sorts of things. Sometimes like I’m the kind of person where, like on my site, if it’s like, I like small, medium and large spacing, and I really don’t care. Like I don’t need to get that granular. Like that’s good enough for me. I think it like solves my problem. So I’m like probably the perfect use case where I’m like, I know if I,
needed to, could write some CSS and I could do all this sort of stuff. But I kind of like the simplicity that you’re still have where it’s like, no, there’s just like four spacing sizes and I don’t care that they’re going to be responsive enough. Like I don’t want all the bells and whistles. So, I mean, I guess I’m sort of weirdly your target audience, even though I technically know how to do all those things, but like he’s your audience. Like, do you think they’re more like building websites for other people or you get a lot more like building websites for themselves?
less technical kind of users. It’s a blend for sure, which, you know, in launching Oli and Oli Pro, we, you know, we weren’t sure who we were going to get because this is like a whole new era of WordPress. And there’s a lot of people who, at least if you, you know, read the tea leaves on the internet, which should never do. There’s just so much complaint and this, this and that or whatever. But then we launched it and we’re like, okay. So tons of people are ready to use it. Different kinds of personas from like.
you know, like teachers building sites for their classrooms. And then the really surprising thing was we launched with two pricing plans and we were immediately met with a bunch of questions from like agency folks who were like, we need, we need more installs that more activations. And that was very surprising because you know, everything we learned about, I learned about agencies working in WP Engine was like, they don’t love change. It’s expensive time, time consuming and adding new tools. It’s, it’s a lot of work, but
No, they were, many of them were like ready and like, I think for them, you can see the value. It’s like, okay, well we can get rid of the dependency of a lot of these tools, maybe just build our own thing around the 75 % that’s there. And so we actually have a very like even distribution of sales across our different plans and in support, I see all kinds of personas. you know, it’s kind of.
great in a way to have a diversity of personas. It’s also as a product person and trying to dial in a product, it’s like the worst thing ever. You want like a hero customer that you’re building for. But I think also it does make sense with Oli Pro because we’re just providing, it’s like a design library. And it’s not like a pro tool for builders. It’s designed for people like you. It’s designed for the lady who’s building a website for a classroom or whatever. So it’s just design.
and design is fairly universal as a tool. So I think that makes sense. Yeah, and in my agency experience, we didn’t use a lot of page builders. also didn’t use a lot of… We always hated when a client came with a stock theme and said, can you make this theme forest theme do X, Y, and Z? it’s like, you knew it was going to be more work to do that than to build it yourself. But I also think we often had…
a very specific design. So for us, it was like, all right, we need to make this match this exact design. Whereas like that situation where you’re like, I don’t, I’m not trying to match a design. I just want to, I just want it to look good. I want it to look like somebody designed it, even though nobody designed it or like designed my specific website. So that makes sense. Like, also, you know, you were saying like, it’s hard to maintain like a huge library of like gadgets and gizmos inside your theme. And I feel like we are seeing that.
a little bit with like the block editor where it’s like, they just have so many cool things, but all of them need like a month focus of like, they need like a team of developers on each one, like finishing them or something like that. Yeah, just finish. So it’s like, now you’ve shifted the burden of that to where like, whatever, like your fate is really tied to the block editor’s like ability to deliver. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like, you know, small teams and
Indie product makers, they move fast as hell because there’s no limitations. They just ship the thing they want to ship. They build it, they ship it. But like it’s awesome to have it all in core, but then you’re at the kind of the way things ebb and flow in core, which there’s a lot going on and there’s priorities and though sometimes the most important thing to you is the last thing on people’s list. So, you know, it’s, it’s tough, but you’re right. There’s it’s, it’s so powerful and there’s so much stuff in there, but like
Like many people have said, like one whole cycle of just like fit and finish would really like do a lot for people. you, are there like specific? Well, actually I don’t want to back up. When you design, say you’re going to design a new set of patterns, cause you have, what do you call like the, the pattern, like the themes of patterns that you have? Collections. Collections. You have like creator and what are the other? Startup.
and studio. Okay. When you go in and you’re like, all right, say I’m going to make a new one or I’m going to add on those. Do you start in the editor or do you start in like Figma or a Figma tool? Yeah, I do everything in Figma first because I provide the Figma files as well. So a lot of people love that. They love to be able to get in there and take the patterns and do what they want with them. And I’m also, you know, I’ve done the design of the browser era of my life.
And I just find that I do much more interesting design in Figma because I can move quick, can iterate, I can do… When you’re doing it in the editor, you’re kind of boxed in already. So you’re designing inside a box, inside a box. And so you’re designing within constraints. I would rather design it in Figma, knowing everything I know about WordPress and the constraints therein. I’ll design it there with that in mind and have the freeform nature of Figma, get the design done. And then when I go to put it in WordPress,
I have the design done, the colors picked out, typography’s all scaled out. I have the sample content for all the patterns is already in there. It just saves me a ton of time to start in and work for us. you ever make a design in Figma and you’re like, I don’t know that I can do this in the block editor. And not only that, like it’s one thing to make a design in the block editor. It’s another thing where you’re making a design, but it has to still be editable by other people in the block editor.
in an intuitive way, you can’t just like, I just put classes on everything and I have a bunch of CSS over here that you can’t over. Like you kind of can’t do that as much. Do you ever get to a place where you’re like, I thought I could do this and I can’t, or is it usually doable? Just like just sometimes I usually design it confidently knowing it can be done. Like I said, I’ve, I’ve made hundreds of patterns at this point with all native core, core native blocks. So I.
very much know what can and can’t be done. There’ll be things when I’m in like, I’m in the mode looking at the matrix code falling in Figma and I’m like, that’d be cool if I could do this. And so I’ll design it out. then actually I’m working on a new pattern collection right now. And there’s a thing in there that I’ve included that I’m not sure if it will work or not, because like you said, you can do a lot in there, but is it intuitive for somebody to go in there and change it? That’s the other thing. It’s like, has to be changeable easily. So.
Generally speaking, I design it with all of that in mind so that I don’t paint myself in a corner. And again, I’m all about like, I gotta move quick and efficiently. I think people, if you were to look at the Figma files that I’m designing, never think that these were designed with constraints of a content editor in mind. And I think that’s the trick. That’s the kind of the value that the Oli Designs kind of provide is like.
They look great and they’re designed super well and when they hit the page they look awesome. And they tie entirely into all of the tooling in WordPress. They’re not constrained by anything. yeah, it’s taken many, many years of doing themes to know how to do that. And yeah, that’s where we’re at. Yeah, and it’s interesting, like you’re talking about building patterns, because like, feel like patterns have become so important in WordPress and in Gutenberg.
where you can tell that maybe they were surprised by that. I feel like they didn’t realize that that was going to be such an important central feature that everything else is based on, and they’re kind of catching up to it. But I don’t know, to me it feels like patterns are the central game-changing feature that really, for most people, unlocks, like, OK, now I get why people would want to use this block editor to begin with. yeah.
Patterns are kind of a universal thing across these site editors now everywhere. They’re kind of pre-designed content. And before we had patterns in WordPress, back when I was working at WP Engine, my coworker, John Paris and I, years before, this was shortly after the block editor came out and there was just like not great tooling. We built a prototype of patterns and it was called, we call them sections and layouts. It was just like section page, page sections and then full page layouts.
And they ended up using that when patterns came around, they used that as the prototype. had our screenshots of our thing and the big pattern kind of ticket. And it was like, cool. We kind of like pseudo invented patterns. Not that they wouldn’t have gotten there because it’s such an obvious use case for the site editor that they had to get to patterns some way somehow. But yeah, I saw enough value to be like, yeah, I’m building a whole business around that. Olly is it’s patterns. It’s a pattern library.
and styles and typography, all that stuff, it’s all delivered through patterns. Yeah, and it feels like the next big thing, to me at least, think is gonna be these sort of cloud pattern libraries or ways to, there’s this cool thing with the block header where you can take a pattern from one of your, like the creator pack in Oli, that’s very designed very differently, but as soon as I pop it into my site, which already has all my brand colors and everything like that,
suddenly it looks exactly like the rest of my site. And it’s like the way that they’re super composable and you can move them back and forth. And it feels like that concept of pattern management, cloud pattern libraries. And the thing that Oli has that I honestly, once I was using this, was like, how is this not a thing in core? But you have a custom, it’s basically a custom block where if I’m working, I can start typing the word pattern.
And then all these like pattern library opens up and I can like pop a pattern right there. And the idea that in core, actually can’t, there’s no keyboard shortcut to just get to patterns. You have to like click three different like mouse clicks to get to pattern. But you guys have this like literally like I’m just typing, I can type in slash pad and like all the pattern manager opens up. I can dig through all the patterns, but like this whole idea of like, I can pull in patterns everywhere. Patterns will be shared. Patterns will be probably across multiple sites.
so that I could build it on my staging site and then pull the pattern in on my live site or something like that. I mean, is that where you think all of these are go or like at least tools in WordPress would go? Yeah, so from the very beginning of this, before I had even linked up with Patrick Posner, I had kind of started prototyping out what I thought a cool new WordPress company could be around this stuff. And when we met, we just kind of shared notes. We had like the same exact notes, which was awesome. That’s what you want in somebody who’s gonna partner with you.
From the very beginning, we had this idea that there was going to be two-way patterns libraries. So users can download patterns from our cloud, which is currently what you can do. But the idea was that you would be able to create your own patterns and push them up to the cloud. And then you log into your other site. Maybe you create your own set of patterns that you love to start with. You log into a different site, you pull those in and you can continue to customize them. We’ve seen a few companies doing this now. I Cadence maybe does it in their own way.
We’re, we actually built out the interface for it already. That’s what we use to publish patterns to the cloud. So it already kind of works in that way. We’re just waiting for a few more things on our end and from core to feel like we want to like, cause once you push something out there like that, that’s, it’s kind of a big deal. Pulling patterns to your site is not a huge deal, but pushing them up is like a whole different ball game. And we want to make sure that we’re ready to do that. But.
Yeah, I think that’s the idea. that’s, again, this is not some kind of secret sauce or anything. Our differentiation will be in how we pull it off and how intuitive it is and, you know, all the, all of that stuff. But I think other companies will follow suit in a way because the model kind of just works for patterns as, sort of consumable parts of your site. Like you said, and especially now patterns are
They’re getting even more powerful with sync patterns. And that’s not the end of it. We’re to see more, more kind of intelligent things around patterns and typography and stuff. What kills me is like people look at WordPress like it is now and they’re complaining as if in five years from now, this shit isn’t going to be awesome and do all the stuff that we can’t even imagine. It’s, that’s where I have always pointed to and said like, we’re building for now and two years from now and two years from then and from then.
And just banking on the idea that this thing gets better with my help and your help and everyone’s So yeah Yeah, I keep looking at like the most upcoming release and really though the really 2024 as a whole and like what was WordPress trying to accomplish with 2024 like what were the things that were clearly priorities because there’s it’s definitely was a year of I Was hoping for a year of cleanup the UI
But it was definitely a year of building under the hood APIs like block bindings and things like that. And you see little bits of it like in like synced patterns, which is like a user facing feature, but under the hood, like this next release, there will be no physical changes to synced patterns, but the API underneath it is like, has like moved another like a hundred yards. Like it’s, definitely.
Improved a lot, but it’s not user facing it and that’s kind of the theme of this whole year is like WordPress has done a lot of stuff under the hood that I think is not as exciting or visible or usable yet, but like you can see okay, let’s be realistic It’s a couple years away, but like it’s getting there and it’s like the things are there and I think Patterns pattern development all that sort of stuff is a priority. I don’t think
design controls to the level people want are going to be as much of a priority, I don’t, you know, I don’t know. Are you, do you have an opinion on responsive design controls in WordPress? I think the, it’s so tough because there are parts of the old way of building websites that I’m totally over. I don’t need to actually, you know, I’ve built websites every different way you could possibly do it. And there is something refreshing about leaning on, like you were saying earlier, fluid spacing and stuff like that, that’s in there and, just.
just chucking all that other stuff out and just like, let’s just build websites quick that are like fast and flexible. But there always is a wall that you hit where it’s either custom CSS or particularly if you’re building for a client and they send you a Figma file that has a very specific design, you’re like, I can’t do this in the block editor. I’m going to have to rewrite some stuff. I don’t know that responsive controls really fixes that part, but there’s like, you know, the
the massive mound of people who are asking for it and feel like they can get some value out of it. And the kind of more recent models I’ve seen about using the device preview to sort of do those fine-tune controls, I think that’s fine. And I don’t think that’s something we need to philosophically oppose in WordPress and take some kind of stance to say we can’t do it because intrinsics like…
the new way of life. I don’t know, I don’t necessarily believe all that. It’s a lot of work and it’s hard work, but it’s not impossible to do these things. It’s just priority, like you saying earlier, whether or not they think it’s priority and who dictates how these things end up in there. I don’t know anymore. It’s kind of fuzzy, if they do something responsible control wise, I think it would be valuable and I think it would help ease the conversation of a lot of people who are saying like,
I can’t build in WordPress anymore because of these small things. And that’s a big one that everyone points to and says, I can do this in Webflow. It’s like, well, let’s just get rid of that part of the conversation and bring those developers back in. And maybe it takes little things like that here and there to keep the kind of ecosystem going, you know? Yeah. It’s funny because I have opinions about priorities in Gutenberg. And one thing that I was not really a huge fan of was the zoom out mode where it kind of zooms you away.
I thought, that’s kind of cool, but like so low on my priority list of other things where I’m like, feel like whoever was working on that, thank you. But like, man, it would have been really nice to just hit these other things. And then today I was actually working with a client and we were looking at their homepage and they wanted to move some sections of around and be like, actually this needs to be more featured and this needs to be less featured. And in that moment I thought, man, actually if I had this mode right now, it would be super handy in this call with this client. And it was.
Just like a good reminder of like, damn, you know, no matter what you think is the priority, it’s like every week I change my mind on what I think is a priority. And I just have to like, stay, like you said, stay away from like the, the, the noise sometimes of, of our guys. I do, yeah, responsive really does feel like at least some sort of a little bit of a like, yeah, you can kind of move some things around or, or a little bit more control over how things stack and where they stack maybe.
just some little tiny things like that would probably help. Yeah, just starting with those smart things. It’s like things you know 100 % are gonna need to change on mobile, like stacking order and things like that. They can even start small and just slide little things in, whatever, I don’t know, but I agree. Yeah, centering your text on mobile is like the most common one we get asked. all Everything goes centered on mobile. I’m actually just curious, when you build…
all of your patterns and everything like that. Do you have, you must have some level of like a, almost like an agency would have a workflow for like version control, for tracking changes, for like saving, branching, trying different things, not losing all your work and stuff. Cause I think everybody struggles a little bit with like, it’s all just HTML floating around somewhere and it might disappear. Did you guys have to build any of that out or, or did you find a system for that?
no, not really. We, cause I do like the source of truth design wise is always in Figma. That’s where the design lives. Then when I build them in for like production, I build them on our cloud site. Basically it’s like a WordPress site where they live. We build them and then we push them to a Postgres database at Superbase. And that’s where they’re delivered from. So the site, the WordPress site that I build them on and all this kind of stuff is the media is stored.
is just, it’s just version controlled via backup. So I don’t have each pattern like GitHub or something like that. I’m trusting the system of WordPress and how it is and world of backups. And because they exist on the WordPress site and in our cloud, there’s some kind of backup system there. So it’s pretty low key and I don’t feel the need to change it too much based on it’s pretty low stakes for us.
Yeah, because once you release a pattern into the cloud library, do you guys ever have to go back and change them? Like a new feature comes out. I remember Box Shadows was not around, and now Box Shadows is around. Do you go back to the old ones and throw those things in, or do you have to leave them to support older sites? Or how do you deal with those? No, we just do it and I’ll put it in there. I’ll go into the live site. I’ll change it in there.
click publish and it automatically pushes up to the cloud and then it’s instantly available to a user to download. don’t have to update the plugin or anything like that since it’s all in the cloud. They can immediately start using it. And if I think if you have like a box shadow call on a pattern and you don’t have that on your site, it’s just in the markup. I don’t think it actually busts or anything like that. So then what are you guys working on next? What’s your next big, ollie, exciting thing?
Next big thing is I’m almost done with another collection and this one’s pretty cool. It’s much bolder and colorful and all that stuff. And so I’m almost done designing it and then I’ll convert them to patterns, which usually doesn’t take too long. I’ve gotten pretty good at that part. And then, then I’m going to pivot to back to the setup wizard that we started with.
Two years ago, a long time ago, it caused the internet to shut down for a few days. Infamous setup wizard. I like, I needed a PR team in that small amount of time. They don’t do PR teams in WordPress. No, they don’t. We just give you the Twitter handle and you get to go crazy. Yep, that’s right. We built a setup wizard, it was really cool. I had done this cool stuff, but it was very kind of blunted by the process that we tried to go about it.
So that exists in Oli Pro, but now that we have all of these pro assets, these patterns, these styles, and kind of a better handle on how people are using it, I wanna revisit that and rework it with that in mind so that you can do cool things like not just setting up a site with like pulling in a pattern collection and styles, but if you’re a builder, you might want to build your own theme or a child theme and just pull in these different assets, click a button and get that deliverable and all these cool things.
Luckily, we already have this thing largely built out because we already built it. And so it’s just like refreshing it with some of this stuff in mind. And then I think Q1 next year will probably be looking at the cloud thing, like letting users publish their own patterns into the cloud. I want to chat with some people first. think again, that’s such a big lift. I want to understand how people use that and if they’re actually going to use it.
Because if there are other ways where people are like, nah, I just want to like do it through version control or something else. I want to understand that problem deeply before I go and try to like spend all this time and money on a problem that nobody really has. Yeah, because I remember Beaver Builder did a similar thing. They had a tool they released where you could take your Beaver Builder like templates and they would, you’d save them in your cloud and then you could go to other sites and pull them down and stuff like that.
I don’t know how much it was used. It might be one of those things that everybody thinks they want, but then they don’t end up using, which is the worst place you can find yourself in. it also might not. I’ve been doing some other sites that I want to match my main site’s branding. I mean, is, honestly, I can literally open one site and copy a pattern and paste it. So it’s not that hard of a problem. But yeah, maybe that would have been helpful.
Yeah, that’s a good question. That just reminds me, how come you don’t do child themes? What was the decision on that? That’s funny. I was just listening to a little thing today about child themes and kind of gave a few comments on that. I think with what is possible now in WordPress, think a lot of people don’t need child themes, but then there are still, we still have plenty of people who use them. They want to customize the theme and bulletproof those changes. They don’t want to mess around in the database and I have to…
move the changes from here to here and all this stuff. So they just lock them in a child theme. They conversion control it and do whatever they want. Kind of best of both worlds. In terms of Ali and the pattern collections, we just didn’t need to really because the kind of the beauty of WordPress now is that the value is all in these design tools that are already in core, right? And the kind of the way the colors and typography and all of that in a theme JSON, the way that maps to
tools dictates that like you don’t need child themes, you can just use styles, which is all like the pattern collections we have in Oli Pro are just all patterns, but they are pulling from different styles. So the startup collection pulls from the startup styles. But the cool thing is you don’t have to use that. You can take all those patterns and flip it over to the studio style or the agency style. And you get like thousands of combinations that you can like, you know, mix and match.
You couldn’t really do that with a child theme. Well, you could, it would just be, I know, I feel like it’s just more of a headache. I just feel like we didn’t need to. so I just prefer to kind of keep it this way. And also I think it leans more into this kind of new wave of full-site editing and style swapping and things like that. Yeah, I’m like, I actually make a child theme of Ollie, but you’re right. Like if I started with a child theme of like creator, then like.
how would I get patterns? It would almost segment everything too much if every collection was its own child theme and then you wouldn’t get to have the freedom of mixing and matching. But I do have a child theme only because I’ve added some theme.json stuff. And I do think it would be nice to see some way for you to add some styles to patterns, not just in the UI. If you’re like, I want bold headings here, but now I use that pattern.
on my site headings aren’t bold, there’s something else. now it’s like, there are some little things like that that would be nice to see that all like a little bit more composable than they finally got. I’d like to get in there. that makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s kind of how I’m seeing like customers, that’s kind of some of the stuff they want. yeah, I think we’ll get to that point too. Yeah. So yeah, thanks for talking and like where should people go to sign up?
Where should people get all the, should people get all the, should I tell them not to? Just kidding. don’t know. It’s up to you people. You know, this is the era of do what you want. I think it’s pretty cool. I think it’s one of the more interesting things in WordPress. And I tried to say that subjectively or objectively. mean, because yeah, just, there’s not a ton of super exciting stuff popping off right now. But I think we’re showing people kind of maybe what it’s like to build a modern day WordPress company and what it looks like to build alongside WordPress.
as the main product and we’re just kind of like sprinkling in the value where we can. And I think that’s a kind of a cool model. And I think that’s probably more where we’re going for WordPress products these days, instead of building a giant entity and trying to like bolt it on to WordPress and say like, this is my thing. It’s, I don’t know. I feel like users are over that, that kind of whole Herculean product thing and just, want websites. They don’t want all this junk. They just want websites. So if you are interested in what I just said,
and all this past half hour of talking, you can go to ollywp.com and you can try Olly for free. That’s a block theme. You can use it just totally free. It’s got a bunch of patterns in it. And then if you want a little bit more, if you want to get fancy and get a little saucy, you can get Olly Pro and add some, bunch more patterns to your site and build some really cool stuff. And we have videos and all that other stuff too. And I’m on Twitter still and I’m going down with the ship. I don’t have any other time.
I did create a Blue Sky account, then I got over and I was like, what the hell am I doing over here? don’t have time for this. I can’t start all over. Exactly. was like, what am I doing here? So I’m still on X Twitter and find me there, Mike McAllister. I think I’m one of a few. Yeah, I think you’re actually right because I was in a client site today where they have some sort of donation thing and it went from short codes the last time I logged in to this time they layered their own builder.
thing on top of it that’s like, doesn’t look like anything in WordPress. It’s like, you know, this, it’s like, I won’t say which, who owns it or what plugin, but it’s like a known, it’s, it’s not, it’s a known company. It’s the plugins not as known, but the company is, but like, it was just kind of like, people really are excited about being close to core. And it’s like, I use your theme and I use a block from this and I use a block from this and it’s little teeny pieces. And I didn’t have to install a giant thing on top of it. And it all works together. And it’s like, when you see that happening in real life, it’s really exciting.
when you use some plugin where they built their own stupid thing on top of it, it’s really unflicking and breaks you out of your workflow. So yeah, if you’re in like the close decor world, you should be experimenting with all these other full-sided editing themes and you should be arguing with us on Twitter because that’s the WordPress arguing is happening. All day, every day for the past 10 years and probably for the next 10 years. So get in while the water is warm. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, you bet, man. Thanks for chatting.