WordPress
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WordPress 7.1: What’s Actually Worth Your Attention
WordPress 7.1 lands on 19 August 2026, and for once I don’t think that’s an exaggeration when I say it’s a proper release. Not a “few tweaks and a new default theme” release, mind, a genuine “people have been asking for this for years” release. I sat down and went through it properly for my…
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How I Use WordPress Playground Blueprints to Train Clients (Without Touching the Live Site)
When you launch a new website, training the client is the bit that gets neglected. The block editor is mature enough now that clients can do far more than they used to, but anything new needs teaching. So training isn’t an optional extra, it’s part of the job. The obvious place to do it is…
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Why I Spent 16 Months Turning 400+ Holiday Cottages Into WordPress Blocks
TL;DR: I rebuilt kate & tom’s, a 400+ property holiday cottage site, from Advanced Custom Fields flexible content into a native WordPress block theme. The client can now build pages from patterns instead of waiting on me to code a new widget every time. The hard part was migrating 10,590 widgets out of post meta…
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From WordCamp and 120 Pizzas to a Block Theme Launch
What a contrast a week can be. Last weekend I was at WordCamp, surrounded by a group of WordPress and open source enthusiasts, all buzzing about the same stuff I get excited about. The sort of weekend where you come home full of ideas and convinced you’re going to change how you work. Then the…
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WordPress AI Theme Creation: How Automattic’s New Claude Cowork Plugin Builds Block Themes from a Prompt
Automattic just released a repo that lets you build a full WordPress block theme from a text prompt. I gave it a spin this morning and came away genuinely impressed with a few caveats worth knowing about before you dive in. What Actually Shipped The repo is called wordpress-agent-skills, and it dropped on February 13th.…
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Rethinking Where I Publish My Content
I spent two weeks away recently, travelling, slowing down, taking photos, making notes, thinking. The kind of experiences that stay with you long after you are home. Like most people, I shared parts of it online. A photo here, a clip there, the occasional thought typed quickly and posted without much friction. And somewhere during…
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Behind the Scenes of My Latest YouTube Video: AI, WordPress, and Late-Night Editing
I’ve just uploaded a new video to my YouTube channel where I test how well Claude Code can build a WordPress block theme and honestly, I’m surprised by how good the results were. The video’s called Build a WordPress Theme with AI, and it follows my process of using Markdown context files inside a project…
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Migrating Legacy WordPress Content to the Block Editor: A Real-World Case Study
When WordPress introduced the block editor (Gutenberg), it revolutionised content creation but left many existing sites with a challenge: how do you migrate years of legacy content, custom widgets, and meta fields to the new block-based system? There’s is a tool called try-wordpress that converts HTML into blocks, but it only works with content stored…
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Dancing with AI – Reflections from the Bristol WordPress Meetup
Last night, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Bristol WordPress Meetup, an event that’s quickly becoming one of the most vibrant and growing tech communities in our region. While I run the Cheltenham WordPress Meetup myself, I’m always keen to support other groups, and it was a real honour to be invited to…