WordPress and Woo Themes with Ollie and AI/MCP ft Mike McAlister

Brian Coords (00:02.312)
Hey, welcome to Webmasters FM. Today I have Mike. Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike (00:08.91)
Thanks for having me back. I think this is my third time maybe.

Brian Coords (00:12.81)
Probably. I’ve gotten really lazy about finding new people. I’ll ask, I’ll get a bunch of recommendations. I’ll reach out calendars, you know, yeah, yeah, we’re gonna do it, calendar, and then I just go, So just go to my old favorites.

Mike (00:24.632)
Maybe this should becomes this is just our podcast now.

Brian Coords (00:27.272)
Yeah, there we go. I think there’s probably a lot we could talk about. There’s probably a lot we could talk about and not record. But let’s talk about let’s talk about I kinda wanna talk about Ollie. maybe I would assume if anybody is listening to this, they they know what Ollie is. They what WordPress is. but I guess maybe you could give the elevator pitch of Ollie and then I want talk about two of the new sort of features that came out this year that we haven’t really had a chance to dive into. But yeah, maybe

Mike (00:33.9)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (00:56.894)
How do you how do you pitch Ollie these days?

Mike (01:00.366)
I don’t know. It’s so hard to pitch anything these days in this crazy transition. But yeah, well I think a lot of people would know OLLI as it’s it was a a full site editing theme, a block theme for WordPress. it is totally evolved obviously from that. We still have that. That still kind of powers the design system of OLI, but it’s more at this point about OLIPR, which is a professional design library and kind of a builder toolkit with some kind of a traditional

WordPress blocks and some settings and and kind of extensions and also now obviously some some really cool AI features. So Ali has become more of like a kind of a builder suite and ecosystem and that’s the direction it’s it’s going now.

Brian Coords (01:45.375)
Yeah, it’s like hard to characterize what some of the features are. I was working on a site that’s Ollie the other day, and the feature where I had a couple of like out of the three columns with some cards in each column, and when I changed one card to like adjust the padding, it automatically goes, Hey, let me just fix all the cards in this column. Like those little like n sort of like nice to have features are probably what I think of most. More than like the theme itself, it’s like, you just took a thing I did and made it like

fifteen seconds faster by just kind of understanding design and stuff like that. I think those are the the things, like the little touches in Ollie that I I probably like the most. But

Mike (02:20.343)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (02:25.515)
Yeah, me too. And that’s like I build those things for me many times where it’s like, why am I if I’m working in a grid that’s all the same, why do I have to apply settings like a thousand times to all these items? And so we just create a thing where it’s synced it up. And I think, yeah, that’s like kind of the essence of Ollie is like finding these like taking an opinion about like this is a site building tool. We’re creating we’re treating WordPress as like a professional site building tool. And then from that context, it’s like, well then what would you need to do that?

Brian Coords (02:36.18)
Yeah.

Mike (02:53.291)
And it’s things like that, these little nice touches where it’s like, we’ll just sync these together, your di design changes are done. So Ollie is like it’s a lot of things, but it’s kind of like this kind of design and intelligence layer in WordPress that like transforms it into like a WordPress Pro kind of thing.

Brian Coords (03:10.174)
Yeah, and I I feel like there was I don’t feel like I hear about this as much, but there was like a really big push for those other page builders. I mean, it’s probably still out there, I just don’t pay attention to it, but of like you need CSS classes and you need to like build a design library from the ground up and you need to have, you know, all this control over everything and you shouldn’t be in a visual editor doing these things. You should be like scoping classes and reusable components and stuff and like

Feel like that stuff always sounds really good in theory. And then when you kind of get into most of your WordPress stuff, you’re like, no, I just kinda wanna open the block editor and I just want it to like do some nice things for me. Like I don’t I don’t I don’t feel like I have to treat every project like it’s like DevOps, everything is completely optimized and stuff. Sometimes like in WordPress, it’s kind of just let me just open it and mess around and see what I like and there’s good guardrails and good patterns to pull from.

Mike (03:52.909)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (04:00.468)
Then it’s like, I d you know, I don’t know. I feel like that’s always good enough for me for WordPress. I don’t know that makes sense.

Mike (04:05.917)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, the cool thing is you can still do both. You can you can write all your code and you you could like still do all that in in WordPress and everything, but we just have chosen to to embrace where it is and kind of the more like I don’t want, you know, no code, whatever phrase. I don’t want people to start yelling at me for it’s not technically no code, whatever, whatever you want to call it, less code. I personally I’m just c in and I’ve like been a designer and a developer for decades now. I love writing code and all that, but

Brian Coords (04:27.945)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (04:35.051)
At this point, it’s like I don’t really want to mess with all that. And I don’t think we need to for most sites. Like the OLLI site, I manage entirely in the block editor. It’s built there. I hop there, I update it. It’s so easy. I don’t think about code or classes or anything. It just is it’s so clean and easy and manageable over the long term. And so I think we’re just okay saying that OLI is this kind of product for people who want to build websites like this.

If you still wanna like go hard as as a in you’re more like you want like more of a builder kind of experience, like Ollie is not for you. That’s not the target audience. We’re saying, no, for people who want to build like awesome websites, fast, beautiful, and they’re like, you know, customizable and tweakable, but also we give you all of these tools to help you like short circuit all of these annoying steps.

Brian Coords (05:01.834)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (05:25.547)
That’s what who Ollie is for, is like this new wave of of building websites with the block editor and and AI as a companion. So more that way, less the other way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Brian Coords (05:37.481)
Yeah. Yeah, and I think it’s like different different projects need different things. I think for a lot I think there’s I mean, I’ve done WordPress sites where you need everything really tightly version controlled and everything, you know, really happens in Git and you’re testing it and all this sort of stuff. And then there’s sometimes where it’s like, you know, a a marketing site or something where you’re like, Well, I just want to get some content out there quickly and I you know, the the like barrier between like I needed

a developer to make this custom fields with this custom PHP template and then I deploy it up and all that stuff. Like there’s a place for that. But like I think a lot of people on WordPress, they just, you know, they don’t really have time or the bandwidth of that and they just want to like get stuff out there. ’cause the publishing is probably the most important part. So I th I like that I like that it’s a it’s a opinionated approach on it. Cause if there’s one thing in WordPress that we don’t have a lot is like the opinionated approach of how to do things.

Mike (06:22.252)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (06:32.567)
I don’t know if the if you have that issue where you’re like, There’s a hundred ways to do everything and sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s really hard to to grapple with.

Mike (06:32.949)
Right.

Mike (06:44.351)
It’s hard to move on from where we are largely because we have all these kind of tentacles reaching to like old WordPress and kind of these new n kind of screens that we’re getting and kind of things touching over here and when it is kind of for everyone, for every use case, it’s like, well, you can’t lean too far this way because then you’re you know, it doesn’t make sense or you know. It does create this, this tricky problem we have.

Now you can still grow and modernize in other ways like we have. but yeah, you’re right. It’s like you you can’t you can’t go too far. And that’s where you know, something like Ollie or some of these other things, it’s like it is just WordPress, it’s all core WordPress. We just kinda bend it a little bit towards this this thing that we want to do. So, like I said, like sh cutting out all of these steps, like you’re saying if you’re in WordPress and you’re like, go change your your color palette, it’s like you could do that four or five different ways.

Brian Coords (07:42.068)
Yeah.

Mike (07:42.477)
You can go to the site editor to do it. You could do it in the global styles panel in the pay block editor. There’s like all these different ways of doing it. So yeah, so I think just everything we do now going forward is gonna be like how do we continue to delete all of these steps out of this process? Because people are g you know, there’s so many new platforms popping up. People are are experimenting with everything. Like WordPress’s growth is not guaranteed or or like you know.

Brian Coords (08:00.7)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (08:10.149)
So we have to continue figuring out taking all of this kind of complexity out of WordPress and and giving them still the power on the other end.

Brian Coords (08:18.28)
Yeah. And one of the places where you put in a lot of work recently was adding WooCommerce support. And I guess I should disclosure I work at WooCommerce. So the I I’m well aware from the backside of how complicated it sometimes is to use word WooCommerce with a block theme. I think there’s a lot of good stuff in there that’s just it’s maybe not as discoverable. Like I said, there’s like so many ways to do everything. It’s hard to know.

WooCommerce, I feel like has like over a hundred something blocks that it has to make because you know, you have your product and your price and your category and your sale tag and your reviews and your, you know, it’s like there’s so many different pieces to it. But you like conquered the mountain and brought WooCommerce templates into OLI. how was that process? And like, what do you feel like you gained anything out of doing doing the work of making Woo compatible with OLI?

Mike (09:16.318)
Yeah, it was I think I spent about two months on and off with other, you know, Ollie responsibilities working on it. So I put it I put some serious time into it. viewers should know if they don’t know me, I’m I am kind of I just attention to detail and and kind of intricate design work and kind of just crafting something unique that is kind of bulletproof. When it hits the page it just looks good all the time.

that is something we always strive for. And so with Woo, it was well first of all, I’ll just say that it was further along than I thought for a block to be like implemented with a block theme. Because I’d checked it out several months before that and I was like, Whoo doggy, I don’t know. but then when I checked it out again, I was like, Okay, there are actually blocks for for a lot of these things. And so yeah, I just dove in and started. And so yeah, I would say

It had more blocks than I thought. The thing that probably was the biggest hurdle was that for you know a lot of the blocks they did have, they just didn’t have enough settings to get like granular design in there. And that makes it tricky because then you’re automatically it’s like, well then I if I if I want to change this, I have to use CSS. And then obviously the trick there is that the CSS the classes can change and do change and

Brian Coords (10:26.964)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike (10:43.786)
So then you’re kind of left with like, well, what do I do here? It’s almost like Woo needs to be so good out of the box, it looks the screens, those the all those default screens need to look so good that nobody wants to customize them or needs to. Or they go granular enough to where people can dial in every screen with the the settings they would expect so that they can get the design how they want. So it was an experience. I I would say like

I was happy to do it so I know where Woo is at because obviously there’s a huge amount of potential. And as as a kind of full site editing project ecosystem, we want to make sure that Woo is covered in this, and that it kind of fits our kind of trajectory of like unabashedly full site editing and forward facing. We’re not interested in like classic WooCommerce stuff, you know, we’re like the FSE version. So

Brian Coords (11:36.958)
Yeah.

Yeah, and the the the thing with the Woo blocks is a I would say like half the time they do something and then they go back to WordPress and then they like contribute to WordPress itself where it’s like, we need a block that can do interactions. So then we have the interactivity API which goes into WordPress and then WooCommerce inherits it. So if they want to fix it, they gotta fix it in WordPress. And it’s a good thing because it

gives everybody access to these tools, but it takes so much longer because WordPress only comes out every few months. And so you’re kind of like dealing and just it’s hard to commit to WordPress. It’s just such a big project and stuff. So I feel like that’s part of it. And then the other part, like you said, with the blocks, there is an open issue right now tracking all the blocks and what style supports they have, because a lot of them don’t support maybe they have a some of the basic ones, but they don’t have a lot of the newer ones, like some of the dimensions and border and all that stuff. But also like

Mike (12:12.929)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (12:30.262)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (12:36.918)
A lot of the blocks in WooCommerce, they’re not like, you know, the basic stuff, a paragraph, an image, whatever, that’s kind of covered. A block in WooCommerce is almost always something more complicated. Like it’s a reviews thing that shows a bunch of star icons, and the star icons change and they’re clickable, or it’s a sale badge, but it’s not just the text. There’s a border around it, and it has to have dynamic text. And you know, so there’s a lot of these blocks, and I feel like the the seesaw that they keep going back and forth with is

Mike (12:48.587)
Right.

Brian Coords (13:05.94)
Do we just make one block with some basic settings and the design kind of looks good out the box? Or does that block have like a hundred tiny little blocks inside of it so you can change all the text and all the little things inside of it? And I don’t think there’s like a really good answer either way. I think there’s enough like low hanging fruit out there that’s being tracked that can improve a lot of that stuff. But yeah, when I look at like a standard product page and you realize like, I don’t know, there’s like

Mike (13:17.321)
Right.

Brian Coords (13:34.823)
30 or 40 blocks there of different things that you need to design and you want to make it coherent and you want that add to cart button to look the same on every page and you want your, you know, variable options and your color swatches and stuff to look the same across the site. Like it’s it’s pretty complicated. So I’m pretty impressed that you were able to make it through it. I’m watching our internal team is working on a default block theme for Woo, and it’s a lot of the same stuff and you know, overriding the cart, the checkout, the all the different pages and stuff. And so

Mike (13:39.456)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (14:04.948)
There’s a lot there, but I feel like what I’ve been hearing from a lot of people is this idea that they want product pages to to be more flexible and more marketing friendly. And I feel like you and I had talked about that a little bit while you’re working on it, which is like if I have a couple of like really banner featured products, I don’t want them to have the same sort of template. I want to make like a full custom landing page and all that sort of stuff. Did you ever experience like have experience with that? Like how crazy can I get?

Mike (14:17.535)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (14:34.26)
customizing like good landing pages for products. Like were there gaps there?

Mike (14:39.933)
Yeah, yeah, we did talk about that. And like the idea is that or at least one of the ideas is, you know, say I have like kind of one of my featured products. I might want to for that product, you know, have my my product layout, but maybe I want to add a few more sections where I can kind of like design something really unique with blocks in the block editor, you know, like we do with with other patterns and stuff. And then kind of like a second content area, you know, where I could do that. within a template. But

Brian Coords (15:06.44)
Yeah.

Mike (15:09.789)
Obviously there you you can’t do that right now. It’s kind of the like the template is the template. So you could do that, find a solution in that direction, or you could just create more templates. but then it’s like, well then you’re creating a bunch of like you random potentially one off templates for different products and that also doesn’t feel great, although, you know, it’s it’s still workable. So I didn’t ultimate I think I we just I released a few templates with it.

But I think, you know, it does raise a bigger question of like, I don’t know, like you’re saying, with with the kind of struggle of customization and these things, and they’re they’re higher stakes because it’s it’s e-commerce. And so, you know, you want to have some guidance and guardrails for people so that their things convert. And so that’s where it’s like, I don’t know, it it’s a good question. Is it like super granular control over these things, or does it output maybe just a few different layouts with styles that

hopefully absorb you know the theme styles or whatever and then you know kind of like the stripe checkout pages and and things like that they’re all kind of a standardized design whatever that’s a whole different tangent but yeah it’s it is a it’s a good question and ultimately I just I decided to delete a a lot of those ideas and keep it super simple because frankly like

Brian Coords (16:21.874)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (16:33.812)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (16:36.457)
I don’t spend a lot of time in WooCommerce, so I don’t know deeply how people use it. And so I didn’t want to make a s a bunch of assumptions and build towards those assumptions without knowing that like how do people even use templates in there? Do they do they care? Do they want the different designs, you know? So we found different ways of kind of adding some some Ollie flavor while also staying as close as possible to like the core Woo experience. yeah.

Brian Coords (16:41.853)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (17:02.174)
Yeah, and in classic WordPress, you could do product templates based on category, I think. So like, okay, I want all my clothing products to look this way, and I want all of my and w with PHP you could get even more grandly, or you could say, I want all of my variable products to look a certain way, or all my subscription products to look a certain way. I that’s I think probably less needed, but possible. But at least, you know, different templates by category. I think the site editor doesn’t fully support that yet. And I know I’ve like

Mike (17:20.447)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (17:29.66)
seen discussions, but usually once you get to that point, you if you’re that crazy, you probably have a developer working on this stuff. And that’s the thing about WordPress is like there’s really nothing you can’t do. Like I think we’re talking about what can I do in the site editor and stuff. But like you slap a custom block on there or something and like a developer can literally do anything they want with it. it just requires that extra control. But like giving people access, especially like to the guardrails, cause

Mike (17:38.228)
Yeah.

Mike (17:45.226)
Right.

Mike (17:52.925)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (17:58.065)
you mentioned like the checkout. That’s been a huge thing. We have like short code, classic checkout that you could do literally whatever you want to it. Like you could move the fields, delete the fields, add whatever. Then we have this block one that’s a little closer to like the Stripe or the Shopify experience where it’s like, no, we’re just gonna do some best practices. It’s not super customizable, but it’s like we know it converts better. We test it, like it’s very clearly a better experience for you.

Mike (18:05.47)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (18:22.558)
But yes, you’re not gonna be able to do all the weird, crazy things that like WooCommerce people want to do. And so it’s like just I feel like a constant balance between those two things. And I’m I’m just glad like like I use Woo with block themes on a couple sites and it works pretty well. And I like honestly would not want to go back to the way it was before. so I’m just grateful that we have like a good I like when we shared your theme internally, there was a lot of like,

Mike (18:32.01)
Mm.

Brian Coords (18:50.6)
Wow, made WooCommerce look like that. Like it was it was quite impressive. and so I’m glad that I’m glad that you did it and you did it without having to like do the elementor approach, which is we’re gonna make custom blocks for every single thing ourselves. Like you used the carousel, you used the core blocks. So, you know, hats off to you on that.

Mike (18:53.418)
Mm.

Mike (19:04.478)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah, and we use some like variation blocks. I think it’s a underused thing, just making a variation of a block and kind of tweaking it and adding some additional settings and things like that. Yeah, it was it was a it was a process, but it was a valuable learning experience because like you said, like you could do all this stuff with WordPress. Like if you were a developer, you were making something a site, you could do that. But my job is to make something distributable. And that’s like a whole different job, is to make something great.

Brian Coords (19:36.062)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (19:39.583)
kind of out of the box and you can like dump it on any site and it is reliably works that well. that’s why you can’t get too we can’t get too granular with the kind of things we ship because I don’t want to get trapped into yeah, I just I it it’s it’s we we build for like the median best delightful experience and hope that it’s still like better than than most experiences. so yeah and I think the the final

Brian Coords (20:00.862)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (20:08.756)
thing that I kept coming back to when working on Woo was like where I would hit these roadblocks where it’s like, killer, can’t do that. Bummer. is like and it I tell people this with WordPress as well. It’s like if you want to figure out these problems, these these hills that people are going to get stuck on, you need to like have somebody design a WooCommerce store. Like that is not like the default output, like just a kind of slightly cool looking design. And then have two or three people go and try to build that like

Pixel for pixel and note everything along the way. Cause that’s all it takes before you see, I can’t customize this block. I guess I have to write CSS. And then like note all those things. And then like with that information, you can decide, well, how do we make make it so that the average person can get a design to look like this? You know? is it CSS? Is it this? Do we accommodate that? I feel the same way with WordPress. Sometimes with some of our use usability problems and UX stuff, I’m like,

Brian Coords (20:39.433)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (21:06.514)
I don’t know if people are building like real websites with this stuff. I it it feels like if you were trying to build a kind of, you know, a custom website that had, you know, modern features on it, you would immediately be like, wow, we don’t have this, this, and this. How do people do this? I don’t know. these questions I think are so important right now, especially as we kind of are getting shaken up a little bit and people are deciding, like, am I staying in WordPress? And it’s like, I don’t know, is WordPress gonna

Give me something to tweak my responsive controls or an underlying system that my agent can use to do that? I don’t know. so a lot of these questions can be solved by just building and and kind of recording.

Brian Coords (21:49.193)
Yeah, I did earlier this year I had to do a support rotation internally. So I worked with we have like an in house team that just they’re basically an agency and they just do kind of like high profile sites or like friends of the company, that kind of stuff. And they were doing a Woo store. So I joined them for a week to like design and I had a lot of those same things where I was like, wait, are you guys doing this in CSS? Is there block settings for this? How do I put that into the theme? ’cause it was the classic like, here’s a Figma file, now go build it on Woo.

Mike (22:11.688)
Mm.

Brian Coords (22:18.178)
And after talking to them, it was like, you they do exactly that and they have a ton of feedback. And I was like, okay, so now I know where to get that feedback. And so we turned it into like a discussion about trying to figure out exactly that. Like, do I target the CSS? Like I’m fine to do that, but like, should I do that? Is that safe? Could we make it safe? Can we have a a CSS framework? And then the other piece of it is while I was doing that, it was this was like earlier in the year. So it was like

Mike (22:18.58)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (22:29.364)
That’s perfect.

Brian Coords (22:46.482)
Right after everyone was like, AI is really good now, but it was still maybe I would say I’d say like December AI got really good. And then sometime in like April, I feel like I personally leveled up and knew how to use it better. So this was between those two points where like the AI was pretty good. I still didn’t know how to use it r very well. And I was trying to bring that into it and learning like, okay, how can I use AI with WordPress to make a good design? ‘Cause I could use AI with static HTML and make

Mike (23:01.692)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (23:15.518)
whatever design you want because you have the total freedom. but like you said, when you’re making with WordPress, you’re making something that has to be editable in the block editor for the future. so since then you’ve launched AI stuff for Ollie, MCP tools and some of the other skill and some other things. maybe you walk me through like what you released and like how you got to, because there’s so many ways to do it, but like how you got to like something where you said, okay, this is releasable.

Mike (23:17.3)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (23:24.659)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (23:31.102)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (23:45.372)
Yeah, that’s such a tough thing to figure out right now. Like what do we release? You know, you don’t wanna have to claw things back after they’re like made irrelevant in three months. But yeah, first we did the MCP, that seemed like the obvious one because you know, a lot of builder y people are already kind of working with MCPs and I I always take these opportunities to learn this stuff myself. So it’s like, well it’s

Build an OLI MCP and see what the heck it does and and figure it out. And we’re still figuring it out. There’s so many there’s so much nuance to all of it. And you know, because you’re working with an agent, it’s kind of unpredictable. Sometimes you can ask the same thing and get different answers. or different totally different responses. So, yeah, we did the OLI MCP and it it effectively knows OLI OLIP Pro and how to design with it and you pair it with a skill file and it kind of knows the kind of whole system and and kind of how to work with with patterns and

to ping the Ali Pro Cloud Library to to pull down suggestions and again, cutting out all of this manual stuff. It’s just going and and grabbing pre designed things and so yeah, we’re experimenting with that. And you know, you know, if if you’ve ever worked with MCP, it’s kind of you’re working it’s a fine line of what you’re trying to make because you want it to be like acute enough that it’s it’s helpful.

But if you put if you jam too much stuff in there, it gets slow, it’s it’s kind of too vague. It doesn’t it it doesn’t have great same with the skill, it doesn’t have great kind of context. So it’s it’s kind of balancing them and and just experimenting to see. So we’re gonna release some more kind of improvements to the skill file there because obviously it seems inevitable that there’s gonna be some form of AI site building in in WordPress. I don’t think we know what it is exactly yet.

Brian Coords (25:08.18)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (25:38.282)
To your point about like WordPress is not a great the the the markup is not great for working with AI. It’s it’s kinda confusing. It’s it’s it has to be like reworked a bunch of times and it’s slower. So that is something we’ll have to figure out because if we’re all meant to be working with block code, it’s gonna have to be like faster and cleaner and and simpler.

Brian Coords (25:46.687)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (26:02.281)
Because it affects the design. It affects how good your design is, how quick it comes back, and and and all that stuff. So so that’s you know, and a lot of improvements coming with 7.0 and 7.1. So we’re we’re we’re cool on that. And then just last week or recently we released kind of two in editor AI features, kind of an obvious one that lets you it’s a design prompt.

block where you can kind of ask for designs and it goes in plain language and it goes and grabs them. And then we had a writing prompt block where you can generate content and add context. So kind of give it your sites context and help you write your marketing pages and things like that. And then an AI rewrite feature where you can like select text or a whole section and say, let’s actually make this about this. Here’s a a page you can reference and it’ll go and change kind of that whole section. So these features like if you look at them closely you can see kind of

where it’s going and that instead of a like full blown AI s you know, site builder in your sidebar that you’re kind of chatting full time with, we’re trying to solve these problems where they are, at least right now. It’s like solve this problem, solve this problem, fix this content, do this. Because it’s quicker to send just that small section to work on and fix than have the whole page go out and have it find the thing in the page and fix it.

Brian Coords (27:09.705)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (27:24.262)
Yeah.

Mike (27:26.673)
So in the short term, we’re gonna kind of focus on some things like that, some obvious things, but kind of with a kind of intuitive interface around them.

Brian Coords (27:36.415)
Yeah, I’ve been s watching a ton of internal experiments. Automatic did this thing where they let like all the engineers do whatever they want for a month and come up with like crazy ideas. And I probably saw 10 woo AI things and probably a dozen WordPress AI things. And like it’s the mix between do I add sparkle buttons like later throughout the interface, or do I have like one chat, but now everything needs to integrate with it and stuff? And it kind of like

Goes back and forth and then some of it some of the AI stuff is like does it even need to start with a prompt? Is it you know, is it just under the hood? Somebody did a like an image optimizer type thing. So there’s all these different like ways to do it. And I think we’re still in the experimental phase. But I feel like the key thing is to like

Mike (28:10.279)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (28:23.124)
focus on like what is the user trying to do versus like what can AI like you need to know what can AI do, what is it good at. But it’s also like, what am I trying to do? Like a lot of times I’ll open up a site with Ollie and I’ll have like

Mike (28:31.955)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (28:36.114)
Say I’m working like like I work with some nonprofits that I help out with, just like help their site. And they’re like, Yeah, we wrote all this content and it’s just a bunch of bullet points or something. And you know, you could just stick it in the post content, but it’d be kind of boring. That’s why you have Ollie. So Ollie’s got like a pattern for, you know, some cards or a header on one side and a list of items on the other. And the idea that I could just be like, here’s some content, find a pattern that works for it, put it in there.

Make it look like nice. I feel like that’s the thing that I want the most, you know, is just like I have some content that, you know, somebody wrote. I just find the good pattern for it. It’s gonna match the site. Stick some content in it that I already wrote. Things like that. I feel like that kind of stuff is is really, really helpful.

Mike (29:08.957)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (29:24.313)
Yeah, we’re it that’s a great point. And I think also kind of underscores some of the stuff we’re doing with Ollie or just my like interest and passion right now is like there are gonna be questions about like the next big version of WordPress or like big things that we have to do and all of that. But in the meantime, there are millions of people using the editor every day as is within without you know, a whole AI builder or, you know, whatever.

And if they’re using Ollie, they’re using the the block editor and full site editing and all that stuff. Like we have problems to solve for them today. those problems still have to be solved. Even if we’re gonna build an AI, you know, thing later. these problems are still here every day for them. It’s like another reason why we and ended up introducing our own kind of lightweight responsive controls. It’s like

Brian Coords (30:02.472)
Yeah.

Mike (30:17.904)
I’m fully in support of the WordPress way, but like all of my users have problems today about needing to change their font sizes. So it’s like, well, I’ll just do it. same thing with these these kind of you know initial AI features we’re releasing. It’s again, it’s like it’s a problem I have where I get on the Ollie site and it’s like, well, I have this video script that I just made, but I want to update this section based on this video script. I just select the section, I say update it with this.

Text, it goes boop boop boop, updates it, and then it’s it’s largely done. And it’s good because it knows the Ollie voice and the Ollie style. this is kind of what I was talking about earlier, where it’s like this is this new kind of transition-y kind of f less code, more visual way of building websites. There’s gonna be some people who just entirely use the Claude desktop or you know, and build

that way through CLIs and things, but there’s gonna be tons of people who still want to use the editor and pair it with AI and and like solve these these little problems so that working in the editor is fun and easy anyway if you end up in there. So I’m I’m curious about solving a lot of these things. That’s why we chose those two like obvious things where it’s like, well let’s make a nice interface for just updating your content. Done. Okay. You know what’s next? I think there’s so much opportunity to solve these these micro problems here.

Brian Coords (31:42.175)
Yeah, I think that’s true. Like I was imagining what if you opened WordPress and it’s like how every app now where you open it and instead of a dashboard, it’s just like a prompt and you’re like, what do want to do today? And it’s like, I don’t know. Like if I want to open up a prompt and talk to it, I have Claude or whatever to do that. what I think the I’m I’ve been trying to think like, what are the things that WordPress has that are so valuable that they’ll still be valuable after like AI takes over everything? ‘Cause there’s a lot of things people

Mike (31:51.216)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike (32:08.839)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (32:10.962)
Our imagining of like, what if, you know, we did headless WordPress with a front end that’s just completely React and you could f let your claw design the front end completely and you know, it’s like, yeah, I mean th headless WordPress is a thing and it has a reason, but like, does that really take the benefits of it? Like, what are the benefits of WordPress? It’s all the plugins, it’s all of the extensions, it’s like everything that’s built on top of it. It’s the fact that it lives on a server and it can do things like, you know, integrate feeds and like run jobs and do all these sort of like automated.

Mike (32:32.444)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (32:39.732)
Content tasks for you and it and then I think the main benefit is like it’s a true WYSIWYG of your the front end of your site. Like it’s literally when I open my site in the block editor, it looks exactly like on the front end, but I can literally click on everything and change it. And I don’t think there’s gonna be a w version of WordPress where it’s like, I don’t ever click on blocks. I just type to an agent like, change my heading to say this. No, not that heading, the other heading below it. Like it’s I don’t think that workflow is gonna work. I think like

Mike (32:54.92)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (33:08.65)
Clicking on a piece of content and then being able to do something with it is for sure always gonna be necessary. Like I’m always, if I want to change the font size, I don’t want to ask an agent. I just want to be able to change the font size. Like that’s not good. I don’t just don’t, I just don’t think that’s gonna go away. And so I do think like the the the skills and the CLI and the like MCP and all that stuff is important. And there’s a ton of places I use that. But for like the task of designing my site, I think being in the block editor, looking at it.

Mike (33:19.164)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (33:37.051)
seeing it in real time, knowing what it’s making, I I feel like I feel like you’re on the right track there because I feel like that’s such a powerful benefit that a lot of the other tools out there kind of don’t have because they generate it, but then if you want to change it, you gotta regenerate it and you gotta keep doing that. Whereas like I can you can generate me a pattern, but it’s like I know I can go in and just like do whatever I want to it now that it’s there because it’s blocks. So I feel I feel confident that. I

Mike (33:54.159)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (34:03.803)
Mm.

Brian Coords (34:04.798)
Who knows? I mean who knows what it’s gonna look like. But I I feel like that has to make sense.

Mike (34:10.565)
I d I do think bad UI is gonna go away. Like things that historically just been bad or just just waiting to be deprecated. WordPress could fall prey to that too if we don’t kind of like, you know, get serious about the the this new user experience and kind of iron it out to be like kind of bulletproof. But yeah, there is there’s like so many different ways of imagining like remixing.

Brian Coords (34:18.964)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (34:39.345)
this this whole experience around something else. But yeah, I would say I kinda lost my train of thought, but

with you know I completely lost my train of thought. It’s gone. It’s gone. I it was it was gonna be so good to

Brian Coords (34:54.292)
No, I’ll I’ll edit it out and I’ll just

Yeah. So good you couldn’t even remember what it was.

Mike (35:02.947)
Yeah. What were we just talking about? CMUI. you don’t have to edit this out. I I think I got it back. So, you know, one thing I think is is interesting is kind of thinking about like if an agent is gonna be doing all of this stuff, what does it look like if like if you kind of x-rayed WordPress and s and s showed these different routes that people take? for example, like creating a new page, right?

Brian Coords (35:07.198)
Yeah, clicking on things.

Mike (35:32.338)
Create a page, you’re you’re dumped in a page, all of a sudden you have a bunch of decisions to make. Is this gonna be like a regular using the page template, the regular page template, or is it gonna use a full width one where you’re like building a page out? You know, like are there like ways of like short circuiting these decisions so that the agent knows and can prompt and kind of get people past that? I think we in WordPress we go through so many little painful micro interactions that I’ve been thinking about like how can you

Brian Coords (35:57.289)
Mm.

Mike (36:00.633)
If if if you can solve those like in the underlying system, then you can surface those in a UI and then agents also can take advantage of those things. Because yeah, I I just I don’t think the UIs are gonna weigh. There’s a human thing about people wanting to get in there and just tweak the dials and see it and then confidently know it’s done without having to like flip back over and and kind of do that. I think keeping your context right in front of you and changing something, there’s something like, I don’t know, gratifying about doing that.

And then also like there are gonna be questions about costs and energy use around all this stuff. Like if I can get in there and just go boop and change the font size and it’s done. Or you know, we can come up with an in intuitive different all kinds of intuitive ways of of tweaking all kinds of settings, changing the font size, padding, whatever, to make it easier so that you don’t have to just ask a a a chat bot for it. So I don’t know, I feel like we shouldn’t assume and we shouldn’t build towards this idea like, well

Brian Coords (36:33.482)
Yeah.

Mike (36:57.827)
Agents are gonna do everything. So we don’t have to fix these problems because an agent’s just gonna do it later anyway. No, the experience in editor has to be supreme to begin with. so that the underlying systems know how to like work with it the same way. so I think that’s I don’t know, it’s a it’s something I always come back to where I’m like, we gotta fix this no matter what is happening. If everyone wants to spend a bunch of time learning the AI stuff, I’m all about that. but these everyday problems, we still gotta fix them.

So that so that people stay. That’s it. I got it. I got it back.

Brian Coords (37:29.672)
Yeah, I think that’s a good you got it. That I think that is a good point because I I feel like I’m trying to r when I come in to any A discussion, remember that not everybody has like unlimited access to tokens that’s actually expensive and getting more expensive, and that there’s an environmental and like energy impact to it, and that the best way to do it is to use AI to build something that you then don’t need AI for, like use it to build a piece of software to do something for you, then you just use the software.

Mike (37:44.209)
Yeah.

Mike (37:55.865)
Yeah, right.

Brian Coords (37:59.603)
And I think the idea that I’m gonna have to AI every single tweak, every single change going forward seems kind of or I’m gonna have to go into my code editor and manually write the code myself if I don’t have, you know, Wi-Fi or, you know, whatever it is. It’s like none of that seems sustainable. So like I do kind of agree with you. Like the the user interface is probably gonna stick around for a long time and it should just continue getting better. And we’ve had a big push internally at WooCommerce where

Mike (38:09.229)
Right.

Brian Coords (38:28.008)
We’re focused really on our like backlog of like issues. Like the concept is like, these are real issues, real people came and reported them to us. They’ve been sitting on GitHub for, you know, a couple of years now. And like, sure, we could think about what’s the future, but it’s like, no, these people are actually using it now. They’re probably, you know, people don’t just change their commerce platform overnight. Like that’s a big decision. So they’re probably a lot of them are just invested. So like, why not just fix all that, make it really better for them first before we think about

Mike (38:36.743)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (38:56.848)
some of these other things like like just clean up a lot of these like last like you said those little like micro you know friction points that you hit a lot of times where it’s like, if I update a product but I don’t do this first, it doesn’t work right. And I always have to do this extra step because of that bug and all these little things where it’s like, no, let’s just like get all of that clean. So like that’s been the focus internally. And I think you’re right that like

Mike (39:06.033)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (39:20.53)
Especially with WooCommerce, like at some point I need to log in and just look at a list of my products and I need to be able to change their prices. Like, yes, I do want an AI, like, go find all my hats and put them on sale. Like, that’s cool. And people will use that. But a lot of people are like, no, I just want to open the website and like change a thing and that and see what my, you know, recent orders are and see what all my stuff is. And like that’s just probably gonna be how we interact. Like software itself is not gonna go away just because an agent can do all this stuff for you.

Mike (39:25.319)
Mm.

Brian Coords (39:49.554)
I think, I mean, six months I could be like, I’ve no I don’t even open my computer. But we’ll see.

Mike (39:55.119)
possible. Yeah, I’ve seen the activity on the Woo GitHub. Lots of lots of tickets going on. That stuff, man, you know, it seems obvious, but that stuff all adds up. All those like micro friction points, they all just they add up and and it makes you feel kind of bummed about software. And so and you feel it over time. You’re like, man, you like

Brian Coords (40:11.806)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (40:14.874)
You’re bummed when you wanna when you gotta go log in to do a WooCommerce thing or whatever. Not necessarily WooCommerce, just for this example, but if there’s a thing that bugs you in it and you gotta go do it every time. I’ve had apps like that and and services that I use I’ve just recently stopped using and build my own. I don’t wanna be that guy, but I’m like, I can’t stand the way this thing works. And so whether it’s WooCommerce or Woo WordPress itself, WordPress core,

Brian Coords (40:21.256)
Yeah.

Mike (40:40.186)
Like the North Star should be not just like building something that people can use, but they like using it. That is so hard. Like the gap between like usable and like people like using it is like universes as apart. So, you know, if you could build towards that, and WooCommerce is is tricky because e-commerce is tricky. There’s so many considerations there. But

Brian Coords (40:50.76)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (41:00.115)
Yeah.

Mike (41:04.654)
I think with the power and flexibility and customization in WooCommerce, it it can be done. But like you said, you you gotta solve all these other little problems first, clearing those those issues out and kind of f finding a an opinion about like we’re going this way and we’re building this way. But yeah, I think it’s going in it seems to be moving very much in the right direction.

Brian Coords (41:22.569)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (41:27.53)
Yeah, there’s been a lot of good progress. I think WordPress has a lot of potential. Although there’s like a lot of things in the URL where like, that’s a really good improvement. Now let’s just get it across all of WordPress. Like this looks nice. Let’s just get it. Let’s just put it everywhere because it it’s you know, it’s good enough. But obviously you know, it’s a lot easier to go vibe code your own custom thing that’s perfect for you.

Mike (41:39.714)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian Coords (41:50.549)
than it is to build a platform that like, you know, millions and millions of websites run. It’s it’s kind of crazy. But I agree with you. The ultimate goal, it should be fun to use. Software, like if I’m not enjoying logging into something, that’s not a good sign. So so I’ll I’ll say I appreciate the Ollie approach of like, let’s just make things a little bit easier, a little bit more fun. and maybe you c we could wrap up you just like I I would assume if you’re listening to this, you know where Ollie is, but maybe you just like

Mike (41:51.439)
Yeah.

Mike (42:05.081)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (42:20.04)
Tell people where do they go to find Ollie to you know, what’s the what’s the call to action?

Mike (42:28.196)
Yeah, you can go to Ollie W P O L L I E W P dot com. I say that because when I go do videos and do transcripts, it always says A L I as in like Ollie. And I always have to replace it. It’s like do people hear that when I say it? I think of Ollie, the like the skateboard trick, but I don’t know if people know that. Anyway, it’s Ollie W P and then my Twitter, just type Mike McCowstrick, you’ll find me. There and

Brian Coords (42:39.41)
Mm.

Mike (42:54.542)
Yeah, we do videos. Like I do pr a good amount of videos these days. I’m trying, man, you know, video is a grind. I I like doing it. And the the finished product, I’m like, cool, that’s great. but man, they no matter how many times you try to optimize the workflow, it’s still just a a very manual process right now. So but we put together these these kind of tutorial videos and some of them are Ollie related and some of them are just like, here’s how to build with all of this new stuff. So

I encourage people to check those out because people seem to really like those videos.

Brian Coords (43:26.856)
Yeah, videos are tough, especially now. My kids are home from school for the summer, so there’s always some sort of screaming in the background. But the it is what it is. awesome. Thanks for hanging out today, Mike.

Mike (43:38.917)
Yeah, dude, no problem.