[00:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 438 entitled Taking WordPress, editing further with Amender's AI powered universal content customization. It was published on Thursday, the 25th of September, 2025.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and in a short while, I'll be joined by Sebastian Webb from Amender so that we can talk about this brand new and very interesting product.
Before then, though, a few bits of housekeeping. If you like what we do at WP Builds, why not subscribe? Head to our subscribe page. It's ingeniously at wpbuilds.com/subscribe.
Over there, you're gonna find all of the channels where we produce things. So we post things to Bluesky, Mastodon, x, YouTube, that kind of thing, and you can subscribe on those individually.
But if you want to keep in touch in a more intimate way, fill out the form for our newsletter. If you do that, you will receive two emails a week. One, when we produce the podcast. This is what you're listening to now. It comes out on a Thursday, and we'll tell you about that.
But also we do a show called This Week in WordPress, every Monday at 2:00 PM UK time. If you fancy having information about that, that will also drop into your email inbox on a Tuesday after we've recorded it, and I've put it out the next day.
If you fancy joining us live for that, head to wpbuilds.com/live, every Monday at 2:00 PM UK time. Join us in the comments. It really does keep the show going. And if you fancy comment on that show, WP builds.com/TWIW. It's the acronym for the show's name, This Week in WordPress. Fill out the form and we'll get back in touch with you when there's a slot available.
The next thing to say is if you enjoy what we're doing, and you have a product or service out in the WordPress space, you will appreciate the reach that we have, and the fact that we can get your product out in front of a WordPress specific audience.
If you'd like to find out how to do that, and you'll hear from three companies in a moment that have been doing that, head to wpbuild.com/advertise to find out more.
The WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by GoDaddy Pro. GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.
We're also joined by Bluehost. Redefine your web hosting experience with Bluehost Cloud. Managed WordPress hosting that comes with lightning fast websites, 100% network uptime, and 24 7 priority support. With Bluehost Cloud the possibilities are out of this world. Experience it today at bluehost.com/cloud.
And we're also joined by Omnisend. Do you sell your stuff online? Then Meet Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend. The email and SMS tool that helps you make 73 bucks for every dollar spent. The one that's so good, it's almost boring. Hate the excitement of rollercoaster sales? Prefer a steady line going up? Well try Omnisend today at omnissend.com.
And sincere thanks, go to GoDaddy Pro, Bluehost and Omnisend for their continuing support of the WP Builds podcast.
Right. What have we got for you today? Well, today I'm chatting with Sebastian Webb. You may know Sebastian. He has a website over at Themeover and over there you might have found in the past Microthemer.
Well, he's got a brand new product called Amender, and it's a page builder agnostic way of customizing and editing content on any WordPress website. So it really is quite ingenious.
So we talk about the background of the product, why it has been built by him. How he built it, the technical architecture, and the functionality that's on offer. The fact that it binds heavily, really does lean heavily into AI content creation. We talk about the recommended use cases, and what it's good for, and sometimes what it's not good for. Where the data is managed, and how non-destructive editing can take place. We also talk about the future direction of the product and how you might buy it, aka, the pricing.
That's all coming up and I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast again, although many years later, by Sebastian Webb.
Hello, Sebastian. Nice to have you on. I think it's fair to say you were on the podcast, honestly, eight years ago or something like that. You were one of the, the very early ones I believe.
[00:05:02] Sebastian Webb: Oh, thanks for having
[00:05:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:05:04] Sebastian Webb: and pleasure to be there at the
[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you're very welcome. Sebastian's joining us today because he's got a brand new product.
However, he's had a really credible product in the WordPress space for years and years. You may have heard of it. It's called Micro Thema. And, although we could spend ages talking about that, because I'm sure it's been updated multiple times since we last spoke, we're not, we're gonna talk about a brand new product, which is called Amen.
A-M-E-N-D-E-R. It's available, over on the. The theme over website, which is where Sebastian's products live. and I'm gonna re, I'm gonna direct you to it actually, and ask that you pause this podcast and go and check out the video, which is available on the homepage. So go to theme over.com/amen. So it's exactly as you'd imagine, but the links will be in the show notes theme over.com/amen.
at the top of the page, there's a little circular play icon, which, is hiding a video. And if you go and watch that, it's about 11 minutes long. It will really help you to understand what we're gonna talk about. 'cause I feel some of it may get lost because of the complexity of it. I'm gonna try our hardest to keep up, but you never know.
It might be worth going and watching that. Introduction time. Seb, tell us a little bit about you. Obviously, not like the full hour long version, more like the minute long version, but just give us your potted bio. Who are you, what have you built? How have come to work with the WordPress, that kind of thing.
[00:06:27] Sebastian Webb: yeah. Okay. so I think I got into developing websites. After uni, even though I did psychology as my degree, I wanted to work for myself and I thought it was a good way to get through that. I did websites for electricians and builders and things, and then, and I found that I wasn't charging enough because, I'm too nice to charge enough for small businesses, for websites, but the time it takes, especially when you're learning and you're, it takes you a long time.
So I had decided I wanted a product and. I think, yeah, that I probably worked on micro thema as a way, as a side project, as a way to learn JavaScript. I was still starting out quite early, and then released it on Theme Forest, I think it's called.
[00:07:12] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Yeah.
[00:07:13] Sebastian Webb: got some people brought it. I was like, wow, okay.
I was so excited. So I then, developed it further. And then when I think it was around 2014 15, I created a new version that was a bit more I dunno, a bit more, visual and a bit less niche. It was you could point and click on things and customize the way, it's basically a CSS editor.
You point on something, anything on the page, no matter how, what this element was created by. Whether it's the builder or just native theme files or. or contact form, any plugin, and you can customize the way it looks. and with Mythe, that's easier to do because the way CSS works, of jumping ahead a bit, but we'll talk about Amen as follows.
A similar principle where you can customize anything, the CSS, which is done easily through adding CSS style sheets, but also the content. And that's the hard bit. But, but just looping back to where we were, Yeah, mythe became quite popular when I was, traveling with my girlfriend at the time, and we released this new version and lots of people brought it and then it became my full-time job.
and then I've basically been working on it for about 10 years, over 10 years now. I had kids, about five years ago, and. worked semi part-time for what the early days of my kids being young and then, but kept Mythe going and it's still been my main job, but, Then now that they're at school, I've got time to, to work on something new and I'm working full time again, and I've developed this new product called Amen, which ties in with the AI revolution, but also fulfills a gap that people would occasionally ask me about over the years.
They say, can micro thema, I wish I could like, use it to edit CSS. And it was a bit more like a builder, like a page builder. And I'd always said, no, it's just, a CSS tool because, The way builders work generally is, they, you need to be in control of both the content and the styling in one go, right?
Like you have an interface, generally a say elemental or something, you add some, content and then there's some options where you add the styling for that specific content. And that's how they make it manageable for themselves as developers creating some software, but also just. It's how users have, got accustomed to, using these visual tools to build websites.
and so it, yeah, it's quite hard. What Amanda is doing is quite, it's quite different really. 'cause it's a tool that allows you to customize the content and the styling of anything on WordPress, on any aspect of the page as if you had. Built that page, using like a very traditional h simple HML page, which is what ultimately WordPress outputs a HML page, which is sent to the browser, like a bit like, which is no different in terms of what the browser receives to the good old days before content management systems where you just, there's a developer with an actual HML file and they go in and they make some changes and something appears on screen.
and so the way amended does this, is it. There are various hooks in WordPress where as the page is being built by WordPress core itself, and any plugins that happen to be installed in the theme, it goes through like an execution process where you have, so first of all, it collects all of the assets, like the CSS files that are gonna be loaded.
Then it. Then it works on, say the header, the actual visible header of the page. Then it goes down to the content and there are various hooks where you can customize the content. And then down to the footer, and just before it's sent to the browser, there's this, hook called shutdown. And that allows people to, like plugin developers to customize the actual overall HDML that all of that stuff has come to make.
And that's actually where things like, caching plugins intervene. So the, something like WP Rocket or Lightspeed Cache will in intervene at this stage to try and do some, say optimizations to make your JavaScript smaller or remove unnecessary code. but it's not really been used. By visual builders, at this stage, because generally they, they work higher up in the process.
And so Elementor will create some, the page layout using the, say the con the content or something. that's a hook. It's just called the content. and it inserts changes there. but for what Amanda's trying to do is give complete flexibility to editing the page, just as if you were one of those old fashioned developers that were working on these HDML files.
and the reason I wanted to build this, in the first place is, because of ai. Becoming coming on the scene and basically being quite good at code. So when Chat T three was first released, I think I had this idea quite soon after because I had mythe. It was a, it occurred to me 'cause I was like, okay, what, how am I gonna adapt mythe to this?
And then, oh, wouldn't it be great if I could just mythe could do anything? so I was, I, tested out whether chat GBT could, how good it was at CSS. And it was, it was okay, but it wasn't great. So I just shelved the idea 'cause I thought. Initially it was gonna be an in, an integration with just CSS.
and I thought, I don't wanna build something that's really this complex integration with this AI tool, and actually it's just gonna be disappointing results. And then over the year I started using ai, like everyone, I think I started using AI more and starting to be more and more convinced, with how good it was at coding.
and so I thought, okay, I think now's the time. It's ready. so then I thought, okay, how can I provide a mechanism. For AI to make any change to any website where it doesn't have to consider all the different UIs of all the plugins and WordPress itself and all that. it just needs to make a change.
And the only way to do that is for it to work on the HDML, either on the server side, which is where I'm talking about this shutdown hook or in the browser. So after the page is already loaded, running client side. and Yeah. So once I came to this realization, I set about doing a test.
and my main concern was actually performance. 'cause I thought, is a, is this gonna be weirdly slow? Is it, it's got lots to do. so I did a basic test and to my surprise, you could, a fairly medium sized page, say the micro landing page, which is not short, it's not super long, but it's, it's very sizable.
I was able to, make say a dozen changes, pass the whole page, HML page, make a dozen changes in less than one millisecond, like a fraction of a millisecond, like n point naught, n milliseconds or something. Nor point N one milliseconds. I was like, okay, all 'cause I was thinking, maybe even if it takes, I don't know, 20, 50 milliseconds, if with caching it's not gonna be a problem.
But, this really spurred me on, I was like, okay, this is actually, this can be done quickly. Then I went about basically building, a system of like 10 actions where you can say, insert before, insert, after replace, add, various ways of manipulating the page, and then various things you can do, say whether you're adding text or HT ML if you're a coder and things like that.
and once I got a basics. protocol for it to customize the page. I then integrated with, the ai, the ai, I think I was trying chacha bt at the time, to see whether it could all come together and it can make changes. And I, and once I saw something on screen, I was like, wow, this is, this has got some legs.
So I decided I'm gonna build this. It is probably gonna take me about six months to a year, and I did it. So that's the, that's, that brings you up to the
[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. so just once again, so it's now that, Sebastian has described it, you may have a bit more of a handle on it, but if you didn't watch the video, the visual representation of what you're gonna see will, will really cement it in your head. once again, theme over.com/amanda links in the show notes.
Over on WP builds. So there, there's two product and I hope you don't mind, I'm just gonna do a bit of explaining from my point of view. 'cause I think it'll help certainly on an audio podcast. It, I'm gonna try and help the listener get through this. imagine a page builder basically. So you've got the content area where you see.
what the, user will see of your website. So you've got this big area in the middle where you can see what the user will see. The website is basically in there. And then you've got these sort of panels, to the left and to the right, and you are able. You are able to edit the content. But but the bit, which is confounding to me, and you've just explained quite a lot of it, but we'll dig into that in a moment, is that normally you have to go into the editing interface of the thing that you created that piece of content with.
So let's say you're a Beaver Builder user. In order to amend that successfully, at least anyway, you'd need to be back in Beaver Builders, editing interface. If it was Elementor, you're opening up Elementor. If it was, I don't know, the block editor, just plain old Gutenberg, you are going into there and you're making the amendments and you're click and save.
Now this is totally different. This is utterly agnostic of what created it, and that's the remarkable bit. So you're seeing what Elemental Built, what Beaver Builder built, what the Block editor built, but you are editing it. in the Amen interface. You don't need to worry about that page builder, which is really curious to me because especially for people who are, I don't know, maybe just taking over a website or something like that.
Then. You might not be familiar with that tool. you might have no idea how Elemental works or divvy or whatever it might be, but it strikes me that with Amanda, I don't know whether you are saying that this would be a tool to create content. I don't think you are. I think this is more of a go back and have a
look,
[00:17:55] Sebastian Webb: yeah, I called it Amen. Specifically to draw attention to the fact that it's the, generally it's like this, what you're explaining with, so yeah, say Elemental beaver, build content. I would imagine people using a a amen. To say, one, one use case, like you mentioned, if someone just doesn't know, sometimes the settings for how a page is constructed are littered in all different plugins, different, like WordPress is own.
You've got no idea. And you might think you might wanna take a cheeky shortcut and use a vendor and just change, change some content. 'cause then you have to think about it. But if you are, if you're a developer and you're, and you've, and you know where the original source of this content comes from, I'm, the use case for Amen is more just augmenting.
say a particular widget in some way. So where there's a customization option that you, that's missing that you would like to be there, that the elemental team or whoever they haven't added, because it's maybe quite a niche case or something like that. you can use Amen to fill those gaps. So you can carry on using these tools that have all these, all this pre-made content that saves you so much time.
but if it, you wanted it to animate in a specific way, you can use Amen. You can just say, oh, can you animate this? this aspect of this, I want the heading text to come in from the left. I want this button down here to move in from the right. And there's no, that's quite a specific requirement.
there's no spec, there's no customization option for that. Then. Amen is your universal customization tool that even if you can, you ask ai, oh, can you do this even if you're not familiar with the code that would be required to do it. and yeah, and if you are a developer, you just, you've got quite a convenient way of just, adding a little bit of JavaScript
[00:19:38] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, so it strikes me that it's like a bit of a tool for everybody in that you could go to any, and I'm guessing it's bound to WordPress, it's a
plugin. I wonder if maybe there's a way of making it not WordPress specific in the future. 'cause
[00:19:52] Sebastian Webb: Yeah. Maybe in future, who
[00:19:53] Nathan Wrigley: feels like it could be something you could deploy on any old website, Laravel or otherwise.
but you, go to the piece of content that you want to create, you invoke the amend editor and then up it comes. And in the video, the first thing you do, which I guess is the thing which everybody would do, is you start clicking around and you highlight, for example, the one of the H ones or H twos or something like that.
And you just change it. And so you're in no editing interface that you've ever seen before, but okay, it's okay. You've now changed it. I can't remember. you add a word or something like that, but then you start to say things like, oh, okay. It can do that. That's fine. okay, we get that, and then you, but then you start talking.
To your website, and I maybe I've seen that somewhere, but I don't think I've seen it quite like that. You start asking increasingly interesting questions, so it's a case of, I think you ask it to change the text and then you, I can't remember what the series of words are that you use at the end, but you have to, tell it.
I'm done, basically in the
[00:20:53] Sebastian Webb: Oh, yeah. I say Send,
[00:20:55] Nathan Wrigley: send prompt. That's it. So
[00:20:56] Sebastian Webb: For a fully
[00:20:57] Nathan Wrigley: So you give it your instruction and then finish with send prompt and it does that thing and it changed the text. Then it was, I don't know, changed the gradient on the background or something, and it did that thing. Then you click to this area where there was just a bit of space and you told it to add an animation in, and in this case it was a, green, it was a green leaf, and the green leaf was rotating around, but the animation.
what the heck? So it's not like that's a, an element or a beaver builder module or anything like that, that's come from somewhere. And h how does that even work? So presumably there's a bit of JavaScript, which has to be downloaded and added to the dom somewhere on how, what, just what's going on?
[00:21:39] Sebastian Webb: Yeah. So yeah, basically I'm, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make Amanda able to make any change that a web developer can make, and. One of the things. So yeah, so in terms of the code it can generate is C-S-S-H-D-M-L and JavaScript. And that's basically all of the languages you use when you're creating a webpage.
And, there are certain, the things I was stemming in that video, there, there are certain things it can do very easily, because I've given it some background. So animations, so gsap is the most common animation library. That people use these days. it's quite small and it's fast. and so I've taught amend that AI assistant in amend, this is how you know how to create and it already knows.
The thing about AI models is they already have some basic understanding of all of these technologies, including not just the core. languages, the core coding languages, but also a lot of the popular libraries. but I can give it some nudges and then it can, be quite reliable. And so I basically told it, if they ask for an animation, use gsap, and then it can just create like a small snippet of code and Amen is able to do the loading of any dependency.
So if it adds a small bit of. JavaScript for Gsap Amen. Is able to, just not through ai, but just programmatically a, analyze the code and understand, okay, they're using gsap here. That means we need to load the Gsap library on the page and, and we'll run it. According to what the AI has said.
So when the page first loads, but they could have, they could choose to run it when it comes in view. Actually I think that's the one I use in the
[00:23:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. '
[00:23:21] Sebastian Webb: cause that's generally what you want for animating elements is that when, if an element's halfway down the page, it'll start animating when it scrolls into view, that kind of thing.
So I've done a lot of the. The kind of, the boilerplate stuff behind the scenes so that it's very easy for both the AI or a human to, if they know a bit of gsap code, just pop in a little function and it'll work
[00:23:42] Nathan Wrigley: I think on at the beginning, that was the most captivating thing. It was the fact that there was a little microphone icon. Inside of some kind of web, sorry, WordPress website interface. Maybe that's elsewhere. I've not seen it. and just the idea that you communicate with the website and
[00:24:00] Sebastian Webb: Yeah. You just ask it
[00:24:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You ask it to do something and then, you use the keyword to commit it and then it does it. And now. I mean that just is incredible. I remember being at a Word Camp London event probably about eight years ago or something like that, and there was a guy on stage from Adobe who was talking about artificial intelligence.
And obviously we were nowhere near what we've now got. it was all pie in the sky back then. And this person from Adobe was standing on the stage and he was basically saying. We will talk toward our websites. We'll say, we want to animate this thing. We want a picture of a cat. No, not that cat.
A different one. A black and white cat. Yeah, that one we, over a, and then put a red button underneath it. no. Make the corners around it. You get the idea. We talk at the website and I thought, okay, that's interesting. But it's Star Trek. This probably won't happen in my lifetime.
And there it is. There it is, and it's right inside this tool. Is it like, is that kinda like the, MVP, for, this thing? it, sorry, not MVP is that the UVP? Is AI kinda like a big part that you are pushing forward? Because obviously we've got the ability to amend everything and we'll get onto the nuts and the bolts of how that works and what have you in a moment.
But are you making ai like the front and centerpiece, the first citizen, if you like.
[00:25:22] Sebastian Webb: yeah, it's funny. I, it was the reason why I created this, but after I created it, I realized, actually, I think it's, you can totally use a menu without the, without using the AI features at all. I as a developer, I think, I've, I would find it very easy to use. I've tried to create the interface so that if you know a bit of code, it makes it trivial to just make these code changes that you would know how to make if you were in control of the.
The, content originally, instead of using a pre-made third party package, just make it incredibly easy. And, by making the least number of changes as well, so you can say, instead of ch and instead of replacing a whole section, you can select one small element within it and say, add, an explanation mark or something.
And then if you were to ever change the original. Content in that, in that section, that update will still up. That, that going back to the source and making the change, it will still reflect on the page. The amend will just always add an apostrophe after, say the second paragraph, sorry, an explanation mark or something.
So it's like you're doing very surgical, tiny little code changes just where you need them. respecting like the underlying thing to come through a bit like child themes and
parent
[00:26:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:26:40] Sebastian Webb: kind of concept. but yeah, so I mean it's, I want, I, the AI aspect, getting back to your question is, how important is it gonna be?
I think equally important, really. I think the, what the AI does is it means that anyone, even if you're not technical, you can just ask it. either using that microphone option, which by the way. Only works, in Chrome at the point that we're recording reliably, because that isn't actually, that's not using one of the latest AI models.
That's just the browser's own ability to translate speech
[00:27:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh. Okay. Yeah, that's all shipping in the browser these days,
[00:27:13] Sebastian Webb: Yeah. And so they're all working on this. So by the time people hear this, it might be, it might be available in Firefox as well, but at the moment it's just Chrome. But, yeah, that's, yeah, that, the fact that anyone, that's the, the, marketing pitch if you like, you can just ask your website to change.
You don't have to be technical. that's pretty amazing how, in terms of, and this is, I can say that 'cause it's the AI that's making this possible, this is, but yeah. And in terms of, how. How reliable is that actually working in practice? 'cause there's so many AI tools now, right?
and sometimes they're a bit disappointing. Sometimes they blow your mind like you were telling me about descrip and that just, that blows your mind. with Amanda, I think it's like, it can basically, it can, you know the changes you saw in the video, it can do those. they were pretty impressive.
But there are some changes people might ask. 'cause I get people to add a little thumbs up or a thumbs down when they're using this AI if it doesn't work. And sometimes, and I look at what doesn't work. And so if they're trying to change, say, replace the entire page with. a completely
[00:28:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh. Yeah.
[00:28:21] Sebastian Webb: it's not that it, can't do that at this stage. not reliably. It will probably try and do something, but it just might not be close to what you need it to do. So it's like there'll be, yeah, there's lots more I can work on in this area, which I'm going to, so that the people who are non-technical and also don't necessarily.
Have an intuition about what AI is or isn't able to do. they can, they can, I can keep I impressing them and get them, more on the more and more of those users to be like, wow, this is
[00:28:49] Nathan Wrigley: But it's also got that sort of traditional page builder interface, if you like, where you've got buttons and panels and you can interact with things on a more granular, technical level. So there's text areas and there's areas where you can drop code into and what have you. And one of the things that you're.
Pains to point out in the video is that everything's non-destructive. So let's say for example, that you, ask the AI to do something, but you have an intuition that, that looks weird. That's not what I asked for. Quite, I don't really wanna commit that, but before I. Decide not to commit it, let me go and have a little poke around and see what's happened.
So that's part of the promise as well. Anything that you do in amend, no matter whether you're doing this with the interface, so you're interacting with the UI that you've built or the ai, none of it is being committed until you've decided finally, in the WordPress way to hit publish or update or what have you.
[00:29:40] Sebastian Webb: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. yeah, and on, on the publishing thing as well is, it's it's free. It's as well as it not, you're not having to commit, anything. Even when you do click publish, which by the way, you need, the li the licensing model I've gone for is it's completely free to play around with.
and there's no time limits. It's not like 14 days or 30 days or something. You can play around with the full features in Amanda, but you only pay. you only need to buy a license if you wanna click the publish button so that your end users of your website can see
[00:30:13] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. That's it. We'll get onto the pricing and what have you
[00:30:15] Sebastian Webb: Yeah. Yeah. and, but when you have clicked publish, you can still just, it's not like your changes are then somehow in, in any way more permanent.
You still, if you delete the change within Amen. then it just reverts back to, so say you, you replace one section with a, with an image or something, a text section with an image. if you delete your, amend, amend settings. The AI might have created, but then they're still all visible in the visual interface.
if you delete that, then just the image goes away and the original text just comes straight back. earlier I think you were talking about, how does it actually
[00:30:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I wanna drill into that actually. So let's go. Let's go for that now then. Do you mind if I just interrupt there with a
bit
[00:31:01] Sebastian Webb: yeah. no. Do it.
[00:31:02] Nathan Wrigley: one of the questions that I have is, I guess let's say that for example, I've made a big modification, let's go for the hero section. So it's really obvious what's going on.
I've completely changed the text and I've changed the background image. So what was, once this thing is now a completely different thing, it's very visual, very easy to see. Let's say that I'm on the front end and I see my amend amended version. There it is. Brilliant. But let's say that I go into my original tool, which might have been Elementor, and I click edit with Elementor.
How does that work? Am I then presented with the original version or, yeah. I just really
[00:31:38] Sebastian Webb: it, yeah, in Elemental you'll still see the original. So it, 'cause it doesn't go into the elemental settings and change anything. This is, yeah. So this is why it's fully reversible. and You what you would do. There's a review panel in amend as well. So you can see what changes have I made.
So you might look at it and go, oh, that's bits, that's not what I'm seeing. And so with Amend, you would just, to keep track, you just, you click on the review panel and say oh, view without my amendments as well. So you can temporarily view out and you go, oh, it's gone back to that. And that's why I'm seeing an elemental.
But that's what I mean by if something's editable, if something's easily editable in Gutenberg elemental, or any would. insert your page builder here. I'm not, I don't really recommend overwriting it in. Amen. If you've got an easy way of, because you don't need to. And it would create that kind of, that slightly confusing,
[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:32:34] Sebastian Webb: position where you like, I dunno, where, so it's more about just going beyond when there's no customization
[00:32:38] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's an interesting way of couching it. Okay, so really you're not advising that people wholesale go and edit the text of a blog post. Say for example, in Amanda
[00:32:48] Sebastian Webb: exactly. There's
[00:32:48] Nathan Wrigley: There's do it. Do it in it, the original tool. But let's say there was just something out of reach, I don't know, this particular thing, didn't have the option to change the background gradients or something like that, but you fancied it then in Amen.
You could go and do it. okay. Okay. So like you say, it's an amendment tool, but that's a nice definition to draw because I think people could. Quickly start to rely on it. And because it does do the amendments to the text, maybe they start doing it, and then there's this whole, I've got two websites.
What's going on? They've got,
[00:33:18] Sebastian Webb: Yeah, exactly. but having said that, you, someone was asking me, should I use this to update my WooCommerce product descriptions? And again, I just said the same thing. I was like, I don't think, just, edit it in WooCommerce. But the thing, but one. One reason you might actually use Amender just for prototyping is that you get the live, in, I think in WooCommerce, unless it's changed since I last used it, you're generally in a backend admin panel when you're adding your pro your product descriptions, right?
So what you could, what you would do, and actually you can use the free version of Amender for this. 'cause you don't need to publish if you're just prototyping, but you would, you could just update the product descriptions in Amen to, until it looks like, you know how sometimes you want the text to just align nicely with the image?
You don't want a new word on a new line. so you just do that in Amen and go, yeah, that's right. And then just copy, and paste it into WooCommerce and remove the amendment. And it's, yeah. And it's, you're
[00:34:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay.
[00:34:09] Sebastian Webb: you were, if
[00:34:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So how, is this all. Maintain, how is it stored? Because obviously you're not overwriting anything that Elementor does. This is stuff sitting on top. Let's go for the words on top. It's sitting a layer above, if you like. So how, where is it all being stored?
[00:34:28] Sebastian Webb: Okay. So basically it's, there's just, there's a database, the default name would be WP Micro Content. And, that's basically just your, Your, little snippets of changes. if you added a heading, it'd be the heading text. and then there's also like a, small little configuration thing, basically like a Jason object, like a way of storing data in a standardized way where it says, so the action would be like, pre penned and then the aspect would be, HDML or inner HDML, if it's, if it's just the inner text of the heading. and then there'd be a CSS selector. So this is actually one of the things it's worth pointing out in terms of the how it works is. Whether you are changing the HDML, the final shutdown, HDML output of the WordPress page on the server, or if you're doing it in the browser dynamically, some shortly after the page has just loaded or when something comes into view or is clicked.
it always uses CSS selectors to target. The things you want to change. so with micro theme, and it's the same with the vendor. When you point and click on something, a CSS selector is generated automatically by analyzing the HML of the page, and you can customize that CSS selector or just use the default one.
and that's how you apply, traditionally with micro theme and that's how you play styling. But now with Amender, that's how you just. Have, you target something for some sort of change. the pre-end, some inner HDML or adding some text. So basically it just checks those three things.
It's what do I target, what do I change about it? And there's only about 10 aspects to 10 actions you can do. Like insert before replace, replace substring run. and then, several, aspects like CSS, CSS classes, JavaScript function, or just a JavaScript file. And by combining this, you can get, you can basically get any change you want on the.
On the page. so it, in terms of going back to where it was stored, we've got your little configuration which runs these, these action aspect and a little bit of content. and so when the page first, first loads, if it's on the server, it, will run those changes or pull, the changes from the database, and it does that quite efficiently as well.
and then it just updates the HML and then it sends the browser and then it's, its work is done. and if. If you're just using, and by the way, the default option is for it to run. In the client. So in JavaScript it's not actually doing the server side updates. there are various, advantages of one you want, why you would use the server updates versus client side, which we can talk about later maybe.
But, yeah, so basically in the browser there's just a little bit of Jason that, that, amen works. and it goes, okay, what changes do you wanna make? And it just runs through them. and actually, you know what, now is a good time to talk about it. So basically, if you're. If your changes are, say, you're changing, like you'd said a hero section earlier, if you want to run a change there, probably you'd want to use server side because you want that change to be instant.
You don't want to see it how it was and then see it suddenly update even if it's quick. So you don't want that flash of un styled content or flash of changing. So that's when you would. Choose server side, but if it's much lower down the page, something in the footer, then there's no need really for the amendments to be done.
Server side, you can just have a little bit of JavaScript, which runs it, in the footer. and also, if you sometimes. the way, like a particular plugin or theme might generate content is that content isn't actually produced until the, initial HMI is sent to the browser. It's built up dynamically.
Okay. And that's when you would definitely want to use, just the, default, when the dom's ready, run some change kind of thing?
[00:38:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, okay, I understand that now. So you've got these two options. Server client, the client is the default for fairly obvious reasons, but there are, and I guess this is kinda getting into the. The domain of, I don't know, core web vitals and performance and all of that. which do you want and where do you want it?
And is it above the fold? And will it create some sort of content shift or something like that? Make decisions. But you can pick and choose, on each element. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. I'm gonna go back to the AI thing 'cause I'm curious about that. how does that work? So presumably you are combining that with some, I don't know, commercially available AI product.
and do we just drop in an API key? How does it work?
[00:39:08] Sebastian Webb: Yes. at the moment, it's just free. So it's in beta. The Amanda's in beta right now while we're recording this. And so is the, the AI system. The AI system's been around in Mike Thema for a few months now, but I'm keeping it in beta just while I'm, making sure. And while it's in beta, it's completely free as well.
And I want to keep it free for quite a while just so I, I can get people giving me the thumb, get people to use it so I can get the feedback of, oh, this, you did this well, it didn't do this well. And yeah, I've been basically trying out all of the different, like Frontier AI models. I've settled for the time being on Gemini Flash because, it's, yeah, it's just by far the fastest.
I say that as I haven't actually tried Chacha Nano, which is an even, which is a new one that's come out since I, I last set this up. But, yeah, it's just much faster. What I found was, that. The results I was getting from using, say, chat GPT for, or 4.5 were fairly similar to using the flash models, but it was just taking 20
[00:40:17] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, and in this modern world, 20 seconds. Nobody's got 20 seconds.
[00:40:24] Sebastian Webb: and it's a, and it depends on what you're doing, but because it's a live editor, you can't, it really, so I needed it to be fast. and what I also found is that unless you are very explicit in your instructions about how to do a specific thing, it.
The results will be quite variable, even with the more intelligent models. So I wasn't really, and trying to, 'cause they, they talk about token size and that's how that dictates the price, but also how long it takes to crunch through your, give your response.
And I found that trying to provide instructions in such a concise way that the, that I could get a reasonably fast response from Chate was just impossible. And at one point I was just like, oh, no, I, this, feels I've, I've invested a lot in on the hope that. That the, that these AI models were gonna work as well as they helped me write code when I'm working on the plugin.
And actually, they're not, this is a lot more work than I, anticipated. But anyway, when I, finally, yeah, I started trying, experimenting with the faster models that are less capable. And realizing that actually, if you give them the same level of instructions that are necessary to get it right, with the, even the more intelligent models, then they could do it and they're fast.
So it's generally about two or three seconds that you get response with,
[00:41:47] Nathan Wrigley: So Gemini at the moment, and it's using your Gemini account, but, presumably at some point you'll have to switch that out, especially if the product becomes successful. and will it be a case of a API key here?
[00:41:58] Sebastian Webb: No, I am not using Bring your own key actually, because I, yeah, I know a lot of people do. I think the main reason a lot of people do that is 'cause it's easy to set up as a
developer. but they actually advise against it. Like all of the AI providers advise against that. they say for security reasons because you have to store an API key in the WordPress database and, but, but then they may have their other reasons.
But the reason I'm not using that option is because I. if you have your own, if you're using your own, Your own key, my own personal key. then, which it also, again, it isn't, it's not shared, it's not like it's installed on anyone's database. That's, there's a separate server where that it, we like it gets sent to.
but it means that I can train the model, and so which yeah, which is what I've been experimenting with. You get a much. Yeah. When, it comes out of beta and I feel like I've gathered enough information that my instructions are pretty set in stone, I will, finish the process of training the model so that you give, you give it a perfect, you give it an input and you give it a perfect output.
And through doing that, you can get it to stop making like little mistakes where sometimes it provides the response in the wrong format. And so it just doesn't work. It just doesn't do anything. And you can eliminate that.
[00:43:15] Nathan Wrigley: So you're adding, because it's your own server. You can add your own, you can wrap it in your own context if you like, so that when it comes back, it, I don't know. It's not trying to poll the entire internet for some answer. It's just working on whatever it is that you've told it to look at, and obviously in this case, H-T-M-L-C-S-S, JavaScript, bunch of JavaScript libraries, those kind of things are in play.
we
[00:43:37] Sebastian Webb: Yeah.
[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:43:38] Sebastian Webb: Sorry. Yeah. Also, it needs to be trained in providing a format that will then integrate with my software. So it needs, it's got some specialist things that it needs to be good at, and so some training is necessary for this particular, this particular use case of ai. You don't always need to, but I've realized that to get, to get it.
This is the thing with these I tools, like I was saying earlier, like some of 'em are better than others. Others, I feel like there's a percentage chance where if it gets it right. Above a certain threshold, then people are gonna use it and be like, this is great, this is brilliant. If it's, I would say probably about 85% of the time it needs to just do what you wanted.
Or even if it's not maybe to your taste and you can give it a few extra prompts to say, oh, it's, it seems to have understood what you asked it, and it's done something and I feel like in order to hit that threshold and bring this AI assistant out of beta, I need to, it needs to have.
Training in my case, for what it's doing. It's quite a complex thing I'm asking it to
[00:44:37] Nathan Wrigley: do you see that there'll be limitations on what it will? who knows what the next year will bring. 'cause every time we think about AI and think about its limitations, somebody just walks right through that within six months. but are there any things at the moment that you think, for now at least anyway, a completely out of limits.
[00:44:57] Sebastian Webb: I dunno, in terms of, in terms of updating websites, I would say ai, it's funny, it's, The, thing that I found it hard that it's hard to get the AI model to do is often to use initiative. And I think this is where they talk about, what the difference between a GI and AI and what humans can do.
And, it's brilliant in all sorts of ways, but, what I want it to do is, Like use, I've given it instructions on how to analyze the page. So when you, like CSS for instance, when you wanna make a style change, you generally, as a web developer, you you right click, you open up your dev tools, you have a look at the existing styles, how they're applying.
You bring some things together and go, okay, so I need to add this style, and I've taught it how to do that. But it doesn't always do
[00:45:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:45:51] Sebastian Webb: if you know what I mean. So I've explained. and I've given it examples and it does it sometimes, so I know, but it doesn't always take the initiative 'cause it doesn't have this, it's not thinking in the way we think quite the same, it doesn't, and and I think you can nudge it to do these things, but that, I feel it's a solvable problem actually.
even with AI models where they are now, I don't think it's a fundamental limitation, but I feel like that's the main thing that. That's holding it back from being perfect right now, if you mean a perfect replacement for a web
[00:46:23] Nathan Wrigley: I think you're right. I think you're right. I think you're right because, it's a real constrained set of things that you are trying to get it to do. if you are asking, I don't know about medical history of
something then every human is entirely different and there's no real way of locking that down.
But with this, there's only certain, there's only a certain number of ways that you can achieve things with, okay, that's not true either, but you get the point. There are certain effective ways of doing things, like laying things out in tables, grid, flex background, colors, whatever it may be, and. AI seems at least my understanding of it, that stuff is all in view.
might not come in the next six months, it might take a couple of years, but it does feel like it's all around the corner.
[00:47:06] Sebastian Webb: There's a thing I think, yeah, AI is very good at coding. It's just about eliciting that and that's why they often talk about, the importance of prompt engineering and you are eliciting ai, but if you ask it, it knows more about CSS than I do, even though I've had a. CSS editor plugin that I've been, maintaining for a decade.
it's just you have to suddenly ask it the right question to, to act, to get it, to use it. So the knowledge it already has kind of thing. But, but yeah, I think it's, I think it's all possible. I'm hopeful on the way forward in terms of the system I've got where I'm using like a fast model that where I can, I, I've got enough, I can spend enough tokens explaining how something should be
[00:47:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:47:44] Sebastian Webb: to get it to then produce a good.
Response. I just need to go through all the different common things you use in, web design basically, and, train it
[00:47:50] Nathan Wrigley: It is a really interesting tool. I hope we've done it some justice there. Hopefully you've understood that. Basically, it allows you to go in and make amendments to any piece of content in any WordPress website regardless of whether you've got your hands on the plugin that created it or the theme that you are familiar with or whatever.
You just turn up to the content and start making changes. And if you like what you've done, you've saved it. We've explained, or at least Seb has explained how all of that works. the, the, I think this is fabulous. And then of course, throw into that AI and the fact that there's a microphone icon and you can talk to the website is amazing.
It feels to me that as if this would be a really handy thing to have in your back pocket, even if you only deployed it in emergency situations once or twice, you, you just suddenly get that phone call from a client that you haven't heard of from, for years, and you've forgotten exactly how their theme worked.
And how their content is put together on the backend. And you can just go in and, yeah, sure, I'll change your telephone number or whatever it might be. Those kind of things. It might real utility there. So I'll give you the URL one more time. Honestly, go and have a go and have a look at the video because it's gonna explain it far better than I can.
theme over.com/amen. links in the show notes. Is there anything we missed, Seb, is there any sort of burning thing that you're very proud of that you think we should have spoken about that.
[00:49:10] Sebastian Webb: oh I suppose one. One thing that's worth mentioning, is that, which could be a feature in itself, which relates to the AI thing as well, but it's, is that there's, so earlier actually you were talk, you were talking about the animation of a leaf that I added in little space on the page.
And so that, that's achieved using three Js. So that's a library, that you use where. basically if you want a 3D effect on a webpage, three Gs is your go-to library to, to use for that. And so Amanda knows how to use, it's got specific instructions on, if the user asks for some sort of 3D effect, it'll use three js.
But what it's. Tapping into is a broader feature there where you can, you can install any JavaScript package on NPM, I dunno, for instance, like chart js or I dunno, like a other various, all the animation tools and like when you're a web developer, because I'm trying to get, I'm trying to make, the AI assistant.
Able to basically do the same things that web developers do when they're building custom sites. And generally they'll have their set of favorite, packages for a slider or what have you. And so there's an interface, there's a, feature within the Amen interface where you can, just search for a package, install it, and then, Start using it either yourself, just by, writing the code in the JavaScript little editor that there is, or just asking the AI to do something with that package. Create some effect with that package. and I think some people might just use Amanda purely for that. Purely for that. If they've got their favorite builder, they've got, or they write, they just do everything by code and PHP and with WordPress and things, they still just, the hassle of maintaining JavaScript and making sure it only loads where you need it to, often means that, sometimes you might just include a JavaScript on every page when it actually only needs to go on one page and amen.
The way it. It applies. Styles is everything goes in a folder and you set the folder to either load on one page or several pages or something, and so it takes a lot of the headache out of
[00:51:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you actually do tackle that in the video? Probably, I would say probably about four fifths of the way through or something like that.
[00:51:26] Sebastian Webb: yeah. Quite near the end.
[00:51:27] Nathan Wrigley: on, the way to, to get those JavaScript libraries to be implemented on let's say a per page basis and the way that the folder structure works, but also how you can really just quickly say, oh, I wanna be on this version or that version, or whatever it may be.
All done in that graphical user interface. Okay. Thank you. that's a great amendment. And, see what I did there. that's perfect. So once more. Theme over.com/amen. Honestly, this tool, there's no way on God's green earth that we're gonna be able to do any kind of justice on an audio podcast. But hopefully you've got an inclination, dear listener of what, kind of thing you're gonna be looking at.
The pricing is. Is really competitive. And that's gonna be my final thing just before we say Siara, because, it's curious. it's really cheap. Basically. I don't know if you're gonna stick with this, but at the moment, Seb said that you can use the tool as much as you like, so long as you, you are not committing to publishing things.
It's, it's like you've got a permanent demo site basically. but then if you want to purchase it, it's on a per site basis, 29 US dollars for one site. Crazy. 30, sorry. $49 for three sites. Unlimited for 69. but then you've also got a, curious thing in here, which I think I don't think I've seen done before, which is the separation between features and security.
Do you just wanna explain that before we say idea?
[00:52:57] Sebastian Webb: Yeah, so basically, so I've always offered Mike Thema as a lifetime license. So you pay once and you get feature updates and what have you forever. And with Amanda, I'm going for a kind of hybrid, licensing model where basically you, I will, you only need to pay once and you will get one year of new features.
And after that point, you can either not pay anymore and not get any new features, or you can renew, but in either case, you're gonna get security updates and bug fixes for the existing features you were using, when you purchased it. And for a year afterwards. basically to avoid the problem you get with subscription models where you buy something on a subscription model and then you have to renew it because otherwise you've got.
A plugin that's out of date and might be a security risk. And so you're only renewing it for that security even if you don't need the new features. So it's and then you're a bit hesitant about, should I do this? So it's a hybrid thing. I'm trying to keep my lifetime customers happy with the, something that's not gonna force them to be locked into a subscription.
but also have a sustainable model so that people, if they're interested in me building a new feature, then. Then, sure. They'll, they can renew and I'm, gonna be, making sure that I'm building features. People want.
[00:54:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think this is so interesting. I've, yet to see this. This pricing structure, Don, and I think it's fantastic. So let's just reprise that. So if it doesn't matter what you pay, if you pay for it, just once you get these, you get the product and a year of support and updates. But then after that, I actually, you didn't say the word support.
I've
[00:54:39] Sebastian Webb: You do get support. You get support forever, regardless. Actually, I, should have
[00:54:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. but if you don't want to continue using it, and updating with it and what have you can discontinue paying, but you will cont that plugin will be updated. You just won't be able to make use of new features which drop, but you will still get the, the core updates if you like, which make it secure and what have you.
That's absolutely brilliant. and just in one little bit of. clever, clever machination there. You've sidestep the whole problem, which the subscription market brings, and I it's curious that you've made a, you've made a conscious effort to not try to gouge people because you know that a proportion of them will want the updates just so that they can tell their clients it's fine, it's updated, it's secure, even though we're not using it.
So I commend you for that. I think that's really. I think that's really not only clever, but actually very moral indeed. So appreciate that. Thank you. Okay, so there you go. You can find that forward slash pricing on the theme over page. There's a little toggle at the top, by the way. if you end up at a, product which looks it, definitely not the same pricing, just find the amen toggle, you can switch between micro theme or and amen.
And in that way you'll be able to find the correct pricing. So there we go. That's Amender for you. go check it out. And, Sebastian Webb, where can we find you? do you do Socials or anything like that?
[00:56:03] Sebastian Webb: you mean I'm on, I'm on Facebook. I've got, I've got, there's a Facebook group called, micro Community, which I need to update to Sima and Amen Community. These are the two products that I do. so yeah, so you can find me there. find my website. But yeah, that's it really.
[00:56:18] Nathan Wrigley: that's absolutely fine. There's obviously a help section as well on the, on the
[00:56:21] Sebastian Webb: Oh yeah, you can ask me a question forum anytime as well.
Yeah.
[00:56:24] Nathan Wrigley: we go. Okay, Seb, thank you so much for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it.
[00:56:28] Sebastian Webb: great. Thank you very much, Nathan. Bye.
[00:56:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's nearly all I've got for you today. I hope that you enjoyed that. It was very nice chatting to Sebastian. Go and check out the Amender product, and if you enjoyed that, head to the wpbuilds.com website. Leave us a comment there. If you search for episode number 438, you'll be able to leave us a comment, and we would really appreciate that.
The WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by GoDaddy Pro. GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.
We're also joined by Bluehost. Redefine your web hosting experience with Bluehost Cloud. Managed WordPress hosting that comes with lightning fast websites, 100% network uptime, and 24 7 priority support. With Bluehost Cloud the possibilities are out of this world. Experience it today at bluehost.com/cloud.
And we're also joined by Omnisend. Do you sell your stuff online? Then Meet Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend. The email and SMS tool that helps you make 73 bucks for every dollar spent. The one that's so good, it's almost boring. Hate the excitement of rollercoaster sales? Prefer a steady line going up? Well try Omnisend today at omnissend.com.
And sincere thanks, go to GoDaddy Pro, Bluehost and Omnisend for their continuing support of the WP Builds podcast.
Okay, just before we go, don't forget, we'll be back on Monday for the This Week in WordPress Show.
Every Thursday we've got a podcast episode. Wpbuilds.com/subscribe to keep updated. wpbuilds.com/advertise to get your product or service out in front of our WordPress specific audience.
And that's about it. I'm gonna fade in some really dreadful AI generated cheesy music and say stay safe. You have a good week. Byebye for now.
