#236 – Brian Coords on WordPress as the Source of Truth

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, making WordPress the source of truth across web projects, not just the website.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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So on the podcast today we have Brian Coords. Brian’s journey started in teaching and after a surprise detour, thanks to a growing family and a need for new work, he jumped headfirst into WordPress, spending a decade in agency and freelance roles before landing as a developer advocate at WooCommerce. He’s known for his knack for explaining the complicated parts of WordPress, championing documentation, blogging, podcasting, and bridging the gap between community needs and product development.

Brian recently delivered a talk at WordCamp US entitled, The Site is the Source of Truth, Block Themes, AI and Agency Workflows, and that’s the focal point for our conversation.

We start with Brian’s background in both education and development, and how he finds his DevRel role the perfect bridge between those worlds. We then get into the evolution of WordPress from its early days to the present, questioning just what it is that has given the platform such staying power, especially as agencies race to adopt shiny AI tools or static site builders, and are tempted to throw WordPress out with the bath water.

Brian sees unique value in the WordPress ecosystem, especially for sites with longstanding content, integrations, and complex needs. And he makes the case for why the platform is built to last.

We talk through the idea of the site as the source of truth, using WordPress, and increasingly block themes, not only as a publishing platform, but as the repository for all your design, content, and workflow guidelines. Instead of letting generative AI run wild, and potentially cause chaos, Brian outlines how agencies and product teams can centralise approved patterns, templates, and even content guidelines directly in the WordPress site, helping both AI and human users maintain brand and design consistency.

We also unpack the state of block themes, why agency adoption is taking longer than expected? What’s coming soon for WooCommerce users, and how the move to block-based building is reducing plugin sprawl and making sites more resilient. And of course, we wrestle with the tight rope walk of what should go into WooCommerce Core, versus what is better left to the ecosystem, especially in a world where AI can spin up basic plugins in seconds.

If you’re curious about how WordPress agencies can survive and thrive alongside AI, what the future holds for block themes, and how to build smarter, more sustainable workflows, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Brian Coords.

I am joined on the podcast by Brian Coords. Hello, Brian.

[00:04:05] Brian Coords: Thank you for having me.

[00:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you’re so welcome. Brian and I were supposed to record this podcast episode at WordCamp US, but, Jamie Marsland.

[00:04:14] Brian Coords: He ruined it, yeah.

[00:04:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we’re going to blame him. We had another engagement, which was to watch Jamie Marsland. But I appreciate you giving me the time after your WordCamp US experience. We’re both back home now.

But if anybody isn’t familiar with you, Brian, we’re going to be talking a little bit about a presentation that you did at WordCamp US. That’s going to be the fulcrum around which the conversation goes. I’m going to encourage everybody, probably to go and look at the WP Tavern show notes, check them out. We will link to that presentation, which is called The Site is The Source of Truth: Block Themes, AI, and Agency Workflows.

Hopefully gives you some intuition of what we’re going to talk about. Brian, do you just want to tell the audience a little bit about you? I know it’s a rather generic question, but tell us about you, your background, lo these many years.

[00:04:58] Brian Coords: Yeah, so currently I work at WooCommerce as a developer advocate, so just working on community documentation, release posts, the blog, all that kind of communication stuff for WooCommerce.

But before that, I spent like 10 years in the agency and freelancer world building WordPress sites, so I leaned on that for WordCamp US. Especially because you can only talk about WooCommerce so much at a WordCamp, so I leaned on my agency background and figured block themes, AI, all this stuff mixing around, what can I try to make sense out of it, and I don’t know if I did, but I got some thoughts out.

[00:05:34] Nathan Wrigley: I remember a couple of years ago, prior to you getting that job, you were doing various bits and pieces, one of which actually for a tiny period of time was writing for The Tavern. And then I remember you getting the job. I was looking at your profile on social media, I think, and you landed the developer relations job, and I thought, “Oh, if ever there was a job which fitted a character,” it felt like you had dropped into something absolutely ideal. Do you just want to tell us what that role actually involves? And is it as ideal as it sounds for somebody of your characteristics?

[00:06:03] Brian Coords: Yeah. To be honest, I saw that that was a type of job that existed in tech, and before I worked in any web development, I was a teacher. I was a high school teacher, so kind of wanted to bring back teaching and writing into what I did as a day job. So I saw that’s what a developer advocate, that’s like what DevRel does, and I basically spent like a year or two doing it for free, to prove that I could do it and get a job. And was like, “I’ll just pretend to be one, and then eventually somebody will pay me”,. And that’s kinda how it worked out.

I mean that’s basically the job, is you’re teaching, you’re doing a lot of writing, you’re doing a lot of explaining things, you’re taking a lot of community feedback and bringing it back internally and saying, “This is what people are asking for, this is what they like or don’t like about the new feature”. You’re just bridging that communication gap, but you are also not responsible for any code, and that’s the best part of it. I’m less stressed about code overall.

[00:06:57] Nathan Wrigley: I’m just going to go totally off piste here because I want to dig into what you said there, because I find that really interesting.

One of the most important pillars of, I think, every society is the education piece, particularly of the younger generation, the children. I have reasons to be into that, but I won’t share them here. But, very, very meaningful to me.

Do you miss that aspect of life? Obviously there’s a reason that you stepped away from that. Perhaps it was paperwork or burnout or whatever it may be. But do you miss the kind of face-to-face bit? Because obviously I’m imagining that you were, there was you, Brian, at the front talking to actual humans who you could reach out and touch if you needed to. How does this map to that, and the desire that you obviously once had to be an educator with real humans inside a real classroom?

[00:07:39] Brian Coords: I left it sort of accidentally. We got pregnant with our first kid and needed to move, and I just needed to find a job closer to home. And it just was an accident, and I stumbled into WordPress and tech and everything. And so, I did miss it and I felt, I think I had an experience where I spoke at a WordCamp and I was like, it felt like teaching, because it was like I know everybody in the room. This is a community, I know everybody, I have a relationship with them. I’m up in front of the room talking to them, but they’re also yelling at me and heckling me because we know each other so well.

So it reminded me of that vibe. So I kind of did look for this job as a way to bridge the two things, the WordPress and the tech side, and also a chance to do writing and teaching and bring it back a little bit. And maybe one day I’ll go back to a classroom or something.

[00:08:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, maybe. One of the curious things that I think about when you see education done well online, you watch somebody’s YouTube content or wherever that content may land. You sort of get the impression that they just turned on the camera and began. Oh, they’ve added in some animations, and they’ve cut and done transitions and things like that.

But for every, let’s say 30 minutes that you produce online, is there, an hour, two hours, three hours of thinking it through, figuring out the pedagogy, who’s the audience, how do you write to their skill level? Just talk us through that bit a little bit, and I promise that’s the last off-piste bit we’ll do.

[00:09:03] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean, for everything that I record, I spend a lot of time doing drafts of it. I’ll try to write the whole thing and just, what would this look like if I wrote the whole thing out?

And then, I’ve tried doing, a prompter where you read into the camera, and that never feels natural, it doesn’t work. But if I do three or four takes of it, by the time I get to that fourth take, I’ve internalized it, and then I can free flow it after that. And that’s how I approach my talk at WordCamp, where I just kept doing it personally, to the point where I felt like I could just say the stuff naturally.

But I do bring in some of the teaching stuff of thinking about what is the student doing at the time? What are their goals? What is the one thing that they should walk away from this? And I try to bring as much of that into it, but, it’s hit or miss, you know.

[00:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess one of the things that you always were going to miss is the sort of the feedback loop of having people in front of you, you know you’re, if all the children in front of you are gazing at the floor, then you know you’ve definitely pitched it incorrectly and you probably need to rethink. But you’re not necessarily going to get that shooting YouTube videos, but perhaps would, inside of a WordCamp. I can see you nodding, I hope that’s not actually what’s happened.

[00:10:12] Brian Coords: Yeah, your YouTube comments are pretty close to being in front of a bunch of middle schoolers, right? That’s pretty similar. But the face-to-face and being in a real room is important. That’s why I took this job too, is more WordCamps, more Meetups, more time in person, but also I don’t have to leave my house every day.

[00:10:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there is that.

[00:10:30] Brian Coords: I get a balance.

[00:10:30] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really nice, isn’t it? Yeah, so you can be working at the time of day that suits you and your family.

Okay, so back on the piste. The title of the presentation, as I said, is The Site is the Source of Truth, Block Themes, AI, and Agency Workflows. I’m just going to read some of the blurb just so that the listener has context, and it goes like this.

“Block themes give WordPress an opportunity to become more than a publishing tool or a place where finished designs are implemented. With the right theme structure, patterns, templates, and brand guidelines, a WordPress site can become the source of truth for how new pages and layouts should be built. That matters even more as agencies begin using AI in their build process. AI is useful when it can work from existing pieces, approved patterns, real content, design tokens, reusable blocks, and known template structures. It is much less useful when it starts every landing page from scratch.”

And it goes on, but I’ll stop there. Do you want to just summarize what you actually did in that presentation? Then we’ll dig into the bits and the pieces.

[00:11:27] Brian Coords: Yeah, so you submit the idea for a talk months before a conference, and then you get to the conference and three weeks ahead they tell you, “Hey, your talk got selected.” I submitted a couple. That was the one they picked, and then I read all that and I thought, “Did I write that?” I couldn’t even remember writing all that.

But it, the timing actually worked out because we are doing a block theme in Woo right now, and I’m spending a lot of time focusing on that. It all lined up. But I definitely read that description, and I had already started working on some slides and I thought, “Oh, I don’t know how much this lines up to what I actually am presenting.”

But I think the goal of what I wanted to do is talk about, I feel like a lot of agencies these days are saying, “We don’t need WordPress. We’re moving to static sites. We’re just letting AI vibe code everything on our sites.” And I wanted to kind of say there’s some value in the systems that WordPress has. It’s maybe a little more work, but there’s reasons for it.”

And I ended up doing a history lesson of, “Here’s where WordPress started. Here’s where we took the journey of why things are the way they are, and the benefits for agencies.” and so I kind of ended up in a place where I got to that topic, but I did a lot of rambling throughout the presentation. I felt like the context was really important. The like, why are we here? Why is WordPress the way it is.

[00:12:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, that’s really interesting. So you said there, values in the systems that we have, and we’ll explore that in a moment. But technology’s such a weird one, isn’t it? In that most of the evolution of humans, we come up with ideas and then we finesse them a little bit. We adapt them over time, but it can be, a decade, 100 years before any major improvement takes place. You think the printing press, it just carried on as that printing press for many hundreds of years before it got slightly tweaked with linotype and things like that.

But technology seems to be quite happy to wholesale throw the baby out with the bathwater on a more or less continuous cycle. So, why then do you feel that WordPress should buck that trend in the advent of AI? Like, why does it stand a chance when AI systems are becoming ultra-capable, static sites, or just talk to your agent and it’ll just build whatever you want. What is it? What’s the intrinsic value that you think will mean that it will be around in a, I don’t know, 5 years, 10 years, whatever that may be?

[00:13:42] Brian Coords: Yeah, I think that’s a question everyone’s asking, which is, “Is there a unique value to WordPress that you can’t replace with AI?” And I think some people will point to the community and just the ecosystem and the fact that so many solutions already exist. I feel like AI is really good when you have nothing, and you’re going from zero to one. I have nothing and I’m going to make something brand new.

Once you get to something where you’ve had a site for 10 years and it has tons of content and tons of authors and all these integrations and all these sorts of things, AI is helpful, but everything has to move a little slower, everything has to be a little bit more resilient, and those are the places where having a little framework underneath, something like WordPress holding everything together, ends up being a little bit more valuable. But it’s definitely changing when you would use it, when you would reach for it, and I think that’s the part people are struggling with right now.

[00:14:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There’s so many examples in my life where there’s a new innovation, but I stick with the older thing, just because it’s tried and it’s tested, and I know the limitations of it and I know what I can do with it. So maybe that’s a good comparison.

It will be interesting to see how AI is able to adapt and just simply build things which are robust and usable. But I think at the moment, the core promise for anybody trying to sell a website to a client, for example, is exactly that. It’s reliable. It’s battle tested. It’s been used on millions of sites all over the world, and it’s got a familiar interface and you can go in and do this, that, and the other thing, and click save and publish and what have you, and it’ll just work. Whether or not that remains the case a, a decade from now, I guess only time will tell.

But, have this idea in your presentation of the site being the, and you said the, source of truth. What did you mean by that? What is the underpinning of that? What are the bits that kind of spin off if the WordPress site is the source of truth, what are the bits that sort of rely on that foundation?

[00:15:28] Brian Coords: Yeah, I think one of the things that people see when they start using AI is it will just do whatever it wants. So you could ask it for two pages on your site, and they might look completely different. It might pull in some design trend here. The language might be completely different on this other one. It might not understand your audience and your values.

And so with AI, you end up doing a lot of shepherding that’s kind of like, “well, no, this is the target audience. This is my color palette. This is the design things I like to use.” And so I leaned a lot in the talk to things like patterns in WordPress. Where, it’s something we do in WooCommerce where we have a designer, they’re very talented, they make really nice patterns that really conform to our brand. And then AI can go in and say, “pull the patterns down from the site first and use those. Don’t spin up crazy new designs. Use the ones that our human designer put a lot of care and effort into, that live in the pattern library on the website.”

And so the more you put into the website and the more you train AI to, don’t go crazy and create new things, use the stuff I already have, use the tools I have, that I think makes things a little bit more reliable, a little bit more consistent. And so I think for agencies, finding ways to put stuff into the website that’s going to help the AI, and guide it directly to doing things the right way. Instead of it always wanting to like, come up with some brand-new chunk of code that you now have to look at. So that was kind of a part of it definitely.

[00:16:52] Nathan Wrigley: So, what you’re saying there is instead of having all these disparate things like, I don’t know, you’ve got a Figma file over there. And you’ve got a Google document over here. And you’ve got another three different things and you can’t really figure out where the heck they are.

Put it all in a WordPress website, and from the point of view of the design, patterns would fit beautifully for that. You can organise your typography, and basic colour palettes, and layouts, and the way things ought to look. And I don’t know, here’s two dozen ways that we might structure a page. Lock all of that away. You don’t necessarily have to publish it anywhere on the front end, but the AI can go and creep around in there and get some guidance.

But then also presumably you could do the same with, I don’t know, your writing style. You could have draft posts where you outline the manner in which you would like to convey your company. And the words which are off limits, or the words which are definitely going to be used. So in that sense because WordPress can do video, it can do audio, it can do designs, it can do layouts and typography, why not just have that as the source of truth? Is that a sort of summation of what you were saying?

[00:17:54] Brian Coords: Yeah, I think that’s essentially right. And I talked a little bit about, there’s a project in WordPress called Content Guidelines, I think, and it does that. Where you put in a lot of your rules. And then I also talked, a lot of agencies use GitHub and Git repos for their WordPress sites, and in there you can do things like having agents files, and skills and stuff that share across your team.

So sometimes it’s in WordPress, sometimes it’s in that kind of GitHub code base for your website. So it depends on your agency’s workflows and stuff. But the point is, everybody puts stuff in the same place, because when I worked at an agency, it was that. It was, they used Figma and they used XD, and they have a Google Doc with all the technical specs, and then there’s 15 emails from the client. And AI actually is really good at taking all those things and putting it in one place and building a little knowledge base. And then when you bring on another developer, their AI is going to know exactly where that is, and it’s going to make things a little bit more scalable.

So it’s just an organizational principle, like just cleaning things up, putting stuff in one space, and making WordPress sort of the home for that, instead of using all these different tools that maybe you don’t need, or maybe you’re going to lose access to.

[00:19:00] Nathan Wrigley: I can’t remember the name, I think you just called it content guidelines or something like that. I can’t remember the name of that project, and I also can’t remember whether the intention is to ship that in Core at some point.

That seems like a really curious idea. Presumably it’s a non-public facing repository of, I’m doing air quotes, “stuff”. So you just dump into there all of the different bits and pieces. Presumably by trial and error over many iterations, you’ll figure out exactly what the agent’s creeping around in your site, and that content guidelines portion of your site is going to be able to take from that.

And you would amend it, and then when you begin another client site, that would be your first port of call. Get your client guidelines figured out, get that set of constraints worked out, and then move on with the design process.

That’s a really neat idea. Somewhat hidden from the public, but pretty neat. Now, I don’t really deal with agencies. I don’t have any communication with them. Do you have a sense that they’re open to these ideas, or it’s just some sort of curiosity which the core team think they might ship, but who knows whether anybody will use it? Have you got intuitions that this would be used?

[00:20:00] Brian Coords: Yeah, that’s been an interesting one. That content guidelines feature almost shipped, and then it got pulled at the last minute and was kind of like, “Let’s see some real world usage of this.” I think it’s probably really helpful for big news publications. That’s what I’ve heard a lot of. Where they have 20 authors and they want to make sure their authors are doing the right thing, and so that makes sense.

I think for agencies, a lot of the ones I talk to, they really, they like putting things in GitHub. That’s where they like to put stuff, and they like putting it in the code. I don’t know if they’ll put it in WordPress, but I think it’ll be interesting to see. But I feel like we’re all just dealing with, there’s just tons of content, and markdown files, and prompts and skills and all these overwhelming amounts of things, and it’s like everybody together is trying to figure out what are the best ways to do this. And I think it’s just fun to explore the ideas and see. In two years maybe we’ll all have the answer to this.

[00:20:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We’ll have a fresh set of new problems in two years.

[00:20:57] Brian Coords: Yeah.

[00:20:57] Nathan Wrigley: It was curious there, we’d been talking about AI for a while and then when you, corroborated your examples there, you described the humans using it, which I thought was quite interesting. So you’ve got these 20 people working for, let’s say, TechCrunch or something like that. Big organization, lots of editors, lots of authors and what have you. But even if the AI never touches base on that, just the idea that the humans can access it in a human-readable way, not all about the AI.

Just that seems worth shipping. If all that you do is have some mechanism to show brand new author to techcrunch.com, how you would like things to look and feel and what have you, that seems like a reason to ship it even if the AI portion isn’t launched at the beginning.

[00:21:38] Brian Coords: I think everybody’s explored, I know I did, where you go all in on AI and it’s going to write all my stuff, and it’s going to do all these things for me. And then internally we’ve had a, I forget what the post, but somebody wrote this kind of, writing is for humans post, and a lot of people in the company rallied around that. Which is like, it was fun to let AI do some stuff, but writing is important, and writing should be done by humans. We don’t want to put AI content out. So at the end of the day, we expect humans to write, and we still really value that, and writing is a valuable thing in and of itself.

But then AI can come in a little later and say, “Well, maybe I’ll review it for you. Maybe I’ll give you some feedback and you can take it or not.” But it’s been an interesting, I feel like there was a pendulum where AI will do everything, and now it’s like, no, I think we’ll find the places for it to make things move faster, but there’s just still human value, and I’m glad to see that pendulum maybe coming back, at least internally for us it is.

[00:22:34] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, going slightly off piste here, but I have an intuition that by the time another decade has passed, I think there is a version of the universe in which people have become really sick and tired of AI. I think it’s a really plausible future that some things will be viewed with enormous incredulity and skepticism if there’s any hint of it being done by an AI.

So perhaps that won’t be design. Perhaps it won’t be music. Perhaps it won’t be coding. But I’ve got a feeling that writing, especially fictional writing and things like that, but also opinion pieces and things, I think that is highly likely to become, once again, the domain of a human being. And I know for certain that my own children are very skeptical about AI and the future that’s presenting. So yeah, I welcome that commentary. I’ll leave it there if you’ve got anything to follow up with. If not, I’ll ask another question.

[00:23:22] Brian Coords: Yeah, I go back and forth on it. I’ve never listened to AI music, and I don’t think I ever will.

[00:23:28] Nathan Wrigley: No.

[00:23:29] Brian Coords: Maybe I have and I just don’t know it.

[00:23:31] Nathan Wrigley: Curiously, I bet you have. Yeah.

[00:23:32] Brian Coords: Yeah, I probably have. AI writing is the same way. It’s if you can’t tell that it’s AI, will that matter? And I think at the end of the day it will, because I don’t read things unless I know who the author is and I’m interested in their perspective, and I don’t really listen to music if I don’t know, I like to know the story of the band, and I like to know the context. If I’m reading a book, I like to know when the author lived and what culture they’re filtering everything through and, yeah, maybe we’ll be unique and some people will just want to doom scroll AI videos of cats, but I never did that before, so I don’t know if I’ll do it starting now.

[00:24:05] Nathan Wrigley: No, but curiously, it might offer a slight marketing edge, let’s put it that way. If you can certify provably that you are the real thing. Whether that be in the music space and you simply have to record the process of you going through the process of creating a song with all of the mistakes, and heartache, and anguish that that is.

But I feel that maybe there will be a craving for that in the future. Maybe people will literally work harder to find people online who are provably writing their own material, be that songs or making videos or writing and what have you.

So we’ve all been swamped AI and been beguiled by it, I think as you’ve said, the pendulum feels like there’s a bit of a swing in the other direction, and it might be that you can have a marketing edge simply because you’re actually taking the time to, to write things out. So anyway, there you go.

Let’s move on slightly. So block themes. You were mentioning that at Woo you’re currently playing with a block theme. I don’t know how many of those are actually in the bag already and out there in the wild coming directly from Woo. But it does feel that many years ago block themes were being touted as the thing.

It feels like it didn’t turn out quite the way we expected. There hasn’t been this deluge of block themes, and everybody’s put the classic themes behind them. I think people are clinging to classic themes for a variety of reasons. Do you want to just talk about why you think block themes fit into this whole agency source of truth piece as well?

[00:25:28] Brian Coords: Yeah, block themes have been interesting. I’ve seen a lot of agencies that really start to like them, and agencies understand the value. I think, for a lot of existing websites, just changing your theme is hard. There has to be a really good reason to change your theme, because who knows what’s going to break? Who knows how everything is going to work, especially with e-commerce? It’s like if it’s not broken, don’t touch it. There better be a good reason for it.

And so I think in some ways for a lot of people, block themes for existing sites maybe haven’t given them a really good reason to switch yet. But I think it will for a number of reasons. I was actually just talking to a coworker about our block theme that we’re getting ready to launch. Probably by the time this is out, it might be in a public beta.

But one of the things that was interesting is in WooCommerce, there was a theme called Storefront, which was like, that was the WooCommerce theme. And we’re doing a comparison right now, where if you wanted to move from Storefront to our block theme, Storefront had all these plugins. A plugin to do a header on your site, and a plugin to do a little mini cart, and a plugin to do product carousels, and all these plugins you would have to install. And that meant testing them and making sure they work and updating.

And we did a comparison of how many of these things can you already just do in the block editor, and it was like 90% of it already exists in the block editor. And you don’t need a plugin for it, and you don’t need extra code, and you don’t need to buy a new extension. So I think people are starting to see the value of it, once they realize how much is just included. I can change anything. I don’t need a plugin to add this or that to my site.

So I think there’s a lot of value to it, and it just ends up being a little safer because it’s just WordPress and WooCommerce and a theme that only has a little bit of styling. I’m not worried about the compatibility of plugins, and I’m not worried about paying for updates and all these sorts of things, and is it going to break on the next version?

And so I think there’s a lot of value to it, and it just makes WordPress itself more the thing you’re relying on. You’re just relying on the blocks. You’re just relying on the things that WordPress gives you. So I think there’s going to be a lot of benefits to it, but yeah, we have not, there is no WooCommerce official block theme yet, but we’re hoping that there will be one soon.

[00:27:31] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that I thought block themes would tackle really quickly soon after launching, which never kind of ended up being the case, was for example, things like WooCommerce, atomising every bit of a WooCommerce site into a separate, let’s say block. So for example, I don’t know, the add to cart block, and the the I don’t know, show the quantity in the cart in the menu block, and yada, yada.

And you go to the cart page or the payment page, and you would just fill it up with the blocks as you’d like, and add spacing and add margins and what have you. That never seemed to take off, but also I don’t know if it’s still talked about, or the promise of that is still something that you are hoping to deliver.

Just talk us through where we’re at in terms of atomising the entirety of a WooCommerce site into individual blocks. So rather than dropping entire sort of templates or structures, you can pick and cherry pick. obviously there’d be dependencies. If you’ve got this, you must have that. But just tell us where we’re at.

[00:28:28] Brian Coords: Yeah, so overall you can do that for most of a store. I think the only thing that doesn’t have blocks right now at all is like the account pages. Somebody logs in and they see their downloads and their order history and all that. That stuff is, I don’t even think is anywhere blocks at all. But that was one of the things as part of this process is, we looked at all the blocks, because there is a add to cart button block, and there is a quantity selector block, and there is a product image gallery block. I mean there’s like a, more than 100, maybe 200 blocks in WooCommerce.

There’s a lot, but the thing that they were missing was the style controls, which is I think what a lot of people wanted. Which is if I have the button, is it going to look like every other button on my site? And can I customize it? Are all the form inputs on my checkout page going to look just like the drop down on my product selection page?

And so that’s been the big push recently, like actually building the block theme, like 90% of the work of what they’re doing is just fixing the blocks, and making the blocks better. And the theme is just a very thin layer.

So it’s gotten a lot better, and that’s kind of the goal is once we have our own theme we can show, okay, all this stuff is customizable and editable. And I think probably in the next release you’ll see a huge focus on those block style changes showing up in WooCommerce.

[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: I have a curious question that you may or may not wish to answer. Let’s see how this one goes. If you, as you just described, you were talking about you don’t need a plugin for that. You don’t need to worry about an update or a payment for this thing. We’re bringing all that functionality into Core.

I’m wondering what that tightrope looks like, where over there somewhere, part of the community, somebody’s got a paid plugin, which is the basis of their entire livelihood. But it just so happens that, we could really ship that in Core, and that would be really useful to have in Core. We reckon that 80% of the people who use WooCommerce will use that.

How do you decide when something gets made and the obvious sort of community impact that that thing may have had? So as I said, that’s a tricky question. I will leave you to answer it or not.

[00:30:31] Brian Coords: Yeah, it is a huge topic of discussion. James Kemp, who is the Core product lead has been pushing for more of these things in Core. And I think that the big question right now is, are a lot of the people making money on plugins going to be able to continue making money on some of those plugins with AI? Because there’s a lot of plugins that are 100 lines of code that an AI will happily spit out for you.

And so I think the floor is raising on people building plugins. Where if your plugin isn’t doing anything super complicated, if it’s set it and forget it, then there’s probably not going to be a market for it in the future.

But that said, there’s this whole other area of opportunity where there’s tons of plugins that need to be built still. There’s integrations that are really complicated that you don’t want to leave to AI. There’s things around modifying payments and modifying how your checkout works and different types of products. And all of that stuff I think is still available, and I think most people will choose to pay for those sorts of things.

But if your plugin is something, I will just say we’ve, all the ones we’ve brought in are our own plugins so far. So this new WooCommerce release that’s coming out this week is different product variations can have image galleries on each variation. That’s a thing. But that was our plugin. So we took our plugin and we put it in Core, and gave it away for free. We don’t really try to go after if somebody’s got an established community plugin and they’re supporting it. We don’t want to go after them. But we are definitely cannibalizing a few of our own plugins, and turning off a little bit of revenue we get from those to put those in Core. And that’s, we think it’s worth it in the long run to just have a better WooCommerce.

[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: I think that’s a really difficult tightrope to walk, isn’t it? Because obviously you would love to have every piece of functionality available in a, you know, easy to use manner in Core, or at least all the bits and pieces that were essential. But at the same time, there’s this delicate balancing act of the community, which at the moment seems to be, how shall we say it, in a holding pattern? Let’s go with that.

There’s a lot of uncertainty, people who have this sort of utility plugin that does this one thing, as you’ve described, it may be 100, 200 lines of code. Where in the past that was probably going to make you some nice pocket change. It does feel like that is going away.

So if that is the calculus upon which you’re basing whether you build something into Core or not, you’re potentially swooping in and creating something for which there is no business anymore anyway, Because now in the advent of AI, anybody with half a minute can whip that same functionality up, and you might as well have it all security checked and what have you inside of Core.

But very difficult to figure out how to balance damaging, I suppose, is the wrong word, but it’s adjacent to what I’m after. Damaging relations with community members who are great great advertisements for building on top of WooCommerce, and yet shipping all these things in Core. Difficult. I’m glad, I don’t have to square that circle.

[00:33:23] Brian Coords: Yeah, and we have a very vocal extension developer community. They give us feedback all the time. And some of them, I think they’re well aware that they’re much more likely to be threatened by AI, than they are us wanting the functionality of their plugin in Core.

But there’s also a general sense in WooCommerce from, like the customers, which is, “Why do I need so many plugins?” And that’s kind of a concern and that fear of, when I update WooCommerce and I have 30 to 50 extensions, which is very normal for a WooCommerce store, is each one of those going to work? Do I have to worry about that?

And so it is also a balance where it’s almost damaging WooCommerce that you need so many plugins just to run a store. And that why do I need a plugin for this and this, you know? So we’re trying to balance that, where we want to make it feel more secure and reliable.

But also I think a lot of those plugins are much more threatened by AI than they are us getting around. We have plenty to work on before we get around to taking other people’s plugins. We have plenty to work on our own to improve basically WooCommerce, subscriptions, all the kind of Core stuff we already manage.

[00:34:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I feel that in the WordPress space, the most likely bit to survive, is potentially WooCommerce. Just simply because there is so much that is at stake by messing up your website by injecting a bunch of AI slop. Again, I’m doing air quotes.

Because, this is your revenue. If you take your site down for half a minute, that really could lose you, I don’t know, thousands of dollars in orders. But I don’t know if that’s your intuition as well. It feels like brochure sites, that is very much up for debate at the moment. We’ll have to see how the landscape goes with that. But it feels like the WooCommerce bit, the e-commerce of WordPress’s community, it feels like you’re on a bit of safer ground just simply because of the revenue that’s generated by those sites and the reluctance of people to meddle with them.

[00:35:14] Brian Coords: Yeah. I mean that’s what I’ve been yelling internally, so I’m glad you agree. I think e-commerce is definitely much more, has a much stronger moat than static brochure sites. And I think that’s what people in WordPress are sort of dealing with, which is for all these sites that are on WordPress how many of them need WordPress? How many of them need this functionality? WooCommerce definitely. You need a database, and you need security, and you need updates and you need all this stuff.

For a marketing brochure site, you probably didn’t need it to begin with, but WordPress was easier. So the question is for those simple marketing sites, do we make WordPress easier so that they can keep using WordPress, or do we say, “No, we’re going to lean in on publishing, commerce, really complicated, heavier duty sites that probably generate more money, but maybe the total market share goes down,” I don’t know. I think that is a big question.

[00:36:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting. I can imagine in a decade from now, the UI for a typical brochure site almost not even a UI. It’s something that we can’t really conceive of at the moment. It might be that, you speak to a thing, and the thing reacts and amends as necessary. Maybe WordPress will have to fight that territory to keep its market share.

But I do feel that the WooCommerce side, I think people are going to be able to justify the time put in to logging into a platform and going through a list of products and adding, “Okay, I’ve got some shoes that I’m selling over here and they come in seven different varieties. I want to sell the shoes. I’m going to upload the color palettes for each of those shoe,”. There’s just some calculus of the work that needs to be done and the maintenance that needs to be done. I feel that you’re on much, much stronger ground as you described. So yeah, I think you’ve every reason to be sanguine.

[00:36:52] Brian Coords: Yeah, and I still think people want to log in to something and look at something. Especially with e-commerce, they want to just see a screen of how their orders are doing. They don’t want to ask AI to generate that every single second that they want to see how many orders they have, and what their revenue is for that day and all their analytics. They just want to log in and see the thing that they see every day. They don’t need to vibe code that on the fly by asking AI to generate it, right?

[00:37:15] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know that’s really interesting? I have genuinely never thought about the desire to log into a thing, but that actually makes a lot of sense to me.

This is going to sound extremely out there, but I’m going to say it anyway. There is something of akin to getting home when you’ve been on a long journey, and you finally get to your own front door after sleeping in hotels, beds, and all of that. There’s just something quite nice about getting into you own environment and it’s, “Ah, I’m at home.”

And I actually have started blogging again recently, and I get a real great feeling when I log in and all that familiar stuff is there, and, “Oh, look, there’s all the pictures that I’ve posted on this website these many years.” I think there’s something there. I think that’s really curious. The idea of logging into something, being purposeful about it. Not speaking to the exact same interface that you talk to every other thing to do the job. Having a place, a URL that you go to, the environments how you’ve set it up, I can’t believe I’ve never thought of that before, but I think that’s quite profound. I hope you’re right.

[00:38:18] Brian Coords: Yeah. I hope I’m right too. I hope that there’s just some things in life you don’t want to ask an agent to go do for you, and you just say, “Let me just click on this and change this thing.” Some things are just faster than, “All right, I’m going to text my agent, and hopefully he does it right, and then he’s going to send me a screenshot that it got done.” I mean, I love doing that kind of stuff. I do it for some things, but yeah, sometimes you’re just, “show me that same dashboard.”

[00:38:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I do wonder in the years to come how ready we are going to be to submit all of that control. Just the idea that an essential part of your business, like your e-commerce site could be done by an AI with very little intuition as to what’s happening once that command has been given and it updates that stuff.

But not just that you don’t know what that thing did, what the thousand other things that were done prior to that one prompt. Okay, it looks nice at the minute, but how did it even get there? Well that was about two years of prompting. Okay. All right. Can we unpick that? Not really. We haven’t the faintest idea how it got to this. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Okay. I think I’ve asked everything I wish to ask. Is there anything you wanted to get out before we knock it on the head, Brian?

[00:39:24] Brian Coords: No, just hopefully we’re still here in five years, not just prompting away in our basements.

[00:39:29] Nathan Wrigley: You know what? I think if you’d have asked me that question six months ago, I had less certainty than I do now. I think I’ve seen a sort of, tsunami is the wrong word, it certainly is not that, but a general sense out in the world at at large of distrust and a move towards the sort of more artisan side of life.

And so I think it’ll be curious to revisit this conversation in a few years time and see how that pendulum has swung. If the AI overlords are listening to this in the year 2028, please do not come and get me. I was wrong. But there we go. Let’s hope that we’ve all got somewhere to stand, a beachhead to stand in a few years. That’d be nice to think about.

Okay, Brian, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:40:10] Brian Coords: Thank you.