[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 464, entitled Why Brian Gardner is betting big on Block Themes. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and a few bits of housekeeping just before we get into the chat with Brian.
The first thing to say is that if you are a regular listener to This Week in WordPress, sorry, but we're taking a few weeks off. I've headed over to India for WordCamp Asia, and I'm having a bit of a travel around after that.
Those people who've been listening to this podcast for many years will remember David Waumsley. He was my podcast partner for many, many years, hundreds of episodes, and I'm hanging out with him over at his house in India. So I'm really looking forward to that. Anyway, long story short, This Week in WordPress will be coming back at the end of April for our live show, so look out for that. But apologies if you're missing that, but as I say, we'll be back soon.
The other thing to say is that if you have a product or service in the WordPress space and you would like it to be discovered, well guess what? We have a fairly dedicated WordPress audience. The only reason anybody would really listen to this podcast, I suppose, is if you're into WordPress. And so if you want to get your product or services messages out in front of that audience, head to wpbuilds.com/advertise to find out more. Or just send me an email admin @ wpbuilds.com, or use the contact form, which you can find on the website.
Podcasts are an increasingly credible way of getting your messages out. So hit us up and let's see what we can explore together.
Okeydokey, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Brian Gardner. Brian really is one of those people who has been incredibly influential in the WordPress space. Back in the day, he set up what was probably one of the most credible, bestselling themes of all time Genesis. There was StudioPress and there's been a whole host of other things since then, but Brian certainly has all of the chops to talk about themes, which is what we are doing today.
We're talking about block themes specifically, and Brian's move away from classic themes, the classic way of doing things with template files and all of that, and more into block-based theming.
Why should you do that? What are the benefits? What are the speed, and performance improvements? And we also get a little bit into some other tools out in the WordPress space. Possible rivals, but he's keen to big them up. And so it's theming all the way down today, and I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Brian Gardner.
Hi Brian.
[00:02:56] Brian Gardner: Hey, Nathan. It's been a long time since we had one of these together, but happy to be back and thanks for
[00:03:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you're so welcome. It really has probably several years and, there's been a lot of water moving under the WordPress bridge. I like that. I'm gonna say that again. and a lot of it to do with theming. The theming layout. There's a lot of excitement about collaborative editing and all of the. Fun things that are coming in WordPress, but block based themes are a thing which launched a little while ago, and Brian has been at the forefront of that.
And, Brian, in case there's anybody in the WordPress space who doesn't go back as long as you do, will you just tell us who you are, and what it is that you've done these many years?
[00:03:38] Brian Gardner: Yeah, so I, I'm sure there are several folks who, haven't gone back as far as I do. I go back to 2006, with WordPress and theme development. I started out originally with a theme called Revolution. had to rebrand that into a, company called Studio Press. And from that, Nathan Rice and I built.
The, Genesis framework, which had a really long run. back in the, two, I guess it was late two thousands, early 2000 tens, that sort of a thing. and I've been doing WordPress theme development and design for as long as many people have been
[00:04:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The, gosh, there's, I dunno if that
[00:04:26] Brian Gardner: here we still are.
20. No, it, I, just realised, working at the company that I do wpn and we have so many people who are just younger
[00:04:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Yep.
yeah. Yeah, I know I have the grey hair. I, get your
[00:04:41] Brian Gardner: I have no hair, so I'm even past you, but do, okay. So do you mind, we're just gonna pause on that in a minute. And I know this is probably rehashing a story that you've told dozens of times before, but there's definitely audience members who will not know about Genesis and things like that. Genesis. Genesis, for those of you that didn't know was the thing, it was the.
[00:05:00] Nathan Wrigley: Thing for the longest period of time, you couldn't make it up. if you'd have said to yourself, oh, Brian, I'm gonna, I'm gonna create this theme. Everybody's going to use it. It's gonna be the one that everybody talks about. No, there's no chance that's gonna happen. but it did, it totally happened.
Did you have any knowledge that you were onto something when you first, released it, when you finally released it into the world? Any suspicion it was gonna take off in the way it did?
[00:05:27] Brian Gardner: I did mainly 'cause at the time before that the studio press themes had already established it themselves as a, a, brand and a product that people were using. Genesis was more a product of not wanting to have a bunch of individual themes and so I, Nathan Rice was working for us. I'm like, look, there's gotta be a better way to compartmentalise all the code.
'cause so many of these themes reuse the same code. I'm like, how do we come up with a system that has A, base or a framework, and then on top of it, me, the designer can go in and, make some changes and tweaks and whatever. And we put together that, and, of course, not too long after we started was when, we, the studio press team merged, into, bigger company called Copy Blogger Media, alongside Brian Clark and with his marketing prowess.
I knew for a fact that he'd be able to, I think in his words, I will triple sales within three or six months. and he did. like I knew, I, knew that there were some moves that we made that I knew that this would hit the, we'll call it the WordPress mainstream, the way that it did.
And I guess Genesis was the, precursor to the page building. era. Era. and so it, it was, yeah, it was a great time.
[00:06:47] Nathan Wrigley: right place, right time, under serves what it is that you built. 'cause obviously, right place, right time, rubbish product that doesn't work. but right place, right time, good product, that's just the perfect simulation. And it felt like you just dropped. Literally in when everybody was clamouring for not just WordPress, everybody wanted a WordPress that looked different to everybody else's and kind of fiddle with tinkering with, template files and things like that and learning how it all works.
okay, so we've established your credentials, which are. Incredible. Basically, in our space, there's nobody, I don't think really, that can hold a torch to the stuff that you've done in the theming space. And then of course, several years ago, Gutenberg dropped. There was this sort of moment where the editor was the thing for creating content, and then slowly but surely.
Talk of, okay, how are we gonna do the theming layer? And that's where we're at now. block-based themes. Again, it occurs to me that there's gonna be people in our audience who really are just on a classic theme that they bought years ago from some outlet somewhere. Whatever those, was it theme forest or something like that?
There was a lot of, yeah, That kind of thing. who probably haven't even heard of it. So what's the change in paradigm? How, what's the difference between what you did with Genesis Classic and what you can now do with block-based? I.
[00:08:07] Brian Gardner: So 2000, it's been seven or eight years. we as a company, just to give a little bit of context before we get into it. our copy blogger company decided to sell studio press, and so it's an interesting way of saying it now, because I, have to say we, because I now work at WP Engine, we acquired me back in the day, right?
And WP Engine acquired studio press from us. I did not come over 'cause I just, I was maybe burnt out just in the WordPress theme and design space. And Gutenberg had just been announced. Gutenberg the. the editor that was, and I wasn't sure where all of WordPress was going at the time, and I just needed some space to clear my head and kind of figure out if there was something else I wanted to do.
And so I took a step back from it, watched everything happen, and then I realised very quickly, and this is early on, and, now we're leaps ahead of where we were 5, 6, 7 years ago when the project was first announced. I was like, wait a second. So much of what now is part of WordPress core, and this answers your question regarding Genesis.
So much of what WordPress Core now will offer is a lot of what Genesis itself offered, which was, markup and structural things. Where I was like, so now we didn't even need Genesis anymore, right? Like the beauty with WordPress is that so much of it is, backward compatible. So Genesis themes now and for years into the future will still be fine and work fine.
and so I was like, I, it got me interested again. I was like, wait a second. I'm not, I don't think I'm done here with WordPress because what, the core and Genesis was always based on WordPress core practises best, we, we never, invented. Interfaces or did anything that was proprietary, just a decision Nathan and I made back in the day.
And so now I was like, wow, this is even better. 'cause WordPress itself has all of this, the hooks and filters and the, way to move sections around within Genesis is now handled by WordPress core and blocks. And I spent a little bit of time. just playing around with it. I created a theme called Frost originally, just as like a place to understand how the black theme system works.
and I loved very much what I saw and I liked the promise that it brought, to people like me who like to design and build and empower other people through product. And then, of course, seven years later we're here. I now have my own fun project on the side, as well as, just watching everything.
And then of course, you introduce AI into all of this. it's a confusing, it's an exciting time. It's a lot of things right
[00:10:40] Nathan Wrigley: a little bit of everything. We'll definitely get onto that. I'm gonna ask listeners to pause the podcast after I say this next sentence. Go and check out Brian's kind of the repository for the current projects that he's working on. It's called Powder. so it's spelt exactly as it as you'd imagine, but the, it's not a.com, it's a.design, which is pretty cool.
So it's powder.design. Pause the podcast, have a poke around. There's various different bits and pieces that you can look at, but really you're looking at the, some beautiful design over there, and pretty minimal gives you a flavour of what you can do with powder, and then come back and you'll be able to hear what's going on.
Can I ask you a question about the, block editor? is it for theming? Everything you wish it could have been. In other words, if you go in, are there still weird circuitous routes that you've gotta take to find the thing that you wanna find? If you were designing it from scratch, like if you could throw all of WordPress out of the window and just be, build a design system, which could then fit beautifully into WordPress, would it in any way represent what we've got?
[00:11:52] Brian Gardner: to start, I'll say it's as, as close today as it will ever be to that utopian painting that I would pick, put into, focus. Sure. There are some things I would maybe do differently. there's a lot of, WordPress is just a lot and offers a lot of things to do and how to do things and when you're talking about design and settings and spacing and things like that, there's a lot of just little nuances, things that, maybe you can define within a theme, but maybe there's not a corresponding interface inside of the dashboard.
And so it's a work in progress and it has been for some time. I think it's going a lot slower than most folks would like, including myself. but understandably, the size of the project as a whole is so big that it has to go that slow. I guess if there was a, and, I'm not even sure what I would suggest here other than I'm exploring this with powder is, one thing that never has really existed inside of the WordPress design space is we'll call 'em like the CSS animations or
[00:12:58] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. Okay.
[00:13:00] Brian Gardner: Subtle movements. I'm not a fan of things that are flying across the screen and stuff like that. but just subtle things, experiences on a site that, people would see. I think when Squarespace first came out, maybe there was some there, framer and web flow for sure. Have this baked into it.
And so people would on the surface say, this just is a better web experience. It looks better, it moves better. That sort of a thing. I wish there was a way, and I don't even know how, best to present a UI for it, but. So the one thing in WordPress that I feel like has lacked a little bit, is just the modernism.
And but other than that, like where we're at now with the ability to build and design within the theme and theme JSON file to bring it into the dashboard, there's still some clunkiness. if, somebody said, Hey, what's the one thing you wish you could. Just snap your fingers and be better.
it would be the consolidation of the admin screens. I like where the, new site editor is going and there's been talk, and WordPress 7.0 I think brings it closer by way of, the default admin colour scheme. I just wish there was harmonisation there. there was just like a one experience, not two or three disjointed
ones. so I can totally speak to that because I'm, I am nuts about WordPress. I'm, habitually in there playing around. I have still no idea how I get to certain places when I'm looking, suddenly I'll be in the typography area and okay, how did that happen? How did I end up getting, and then how do I get back to that?
[00:14:33] Nathan Wrigley: What's the way to, and so there's this sort of overlapping. Kind of ways to get into places. there's multiple routes into one place and sometimes the naming changes and you've obviously got this whole ui, which looks more modern than the old WP admin area looks more modern, so that's great.
But then you hop out of that and you're back into the WP admin. And so I, feel that if. If we, let's say we were working, we were talking on a Squarespace podcast. We'd probably have a CEO at the top of that organisation who was saying, okay, this is what we wanna achieve with our product. And everybody under that person just does that because it's a for-profit.
It's this trickle down approach. We've got a. Different setup altogether. We've got community and I do wonder if we've had quite a lot of mis, not missteps, but just experimentation, which has ended up confusing people and because of the confusion and the fact that it's not immediately obvious what to do, the, adoption of block themes hasn't gone where everybody hoped it would go.
[00:15:32] Brian Gardner: Yeah, I, would say that's a fair statement. we have things like the customizer, which kind of was like a half baked. It started to become a thing and then it didn't become a thing. I think Gutenberg essentially replaced it. and just the disjointedness, and again, I think you spoke to it.
Nathan, when you talked about Squarespace and how that's a walled garden and they can control their environment, it's certainly why Shopify, excels that it, the way that it does with, e-commerce is because, the, they can control the all of it, right? Where with WordPress and being open source, which is very much a.
a benefit. you have community contributions, all that kind of stuff. with that though, you have different sets of opinions and different agendas and different things where it's harder to pull together like a, call it a harmonious experience because just you've, it's just, it's a different, foundation.
And yeah.
[00:16:30] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the other thing as well is that we've had things rolling out piecemeal. So one, one example that I've been clamouring for ages, which I feel we finally wrangled to the ground a little bit, is navigation, especially mobile navigation. the default offerings are, Let's say that, they're, not feature rich, they're fairly feature poor. And again, that sort of Squarespace, CEO model where, this is what we want, the sort of the, the, board of directors on down. This is what we want. We want our clients to be able to do this, and this.
And then you are gonna launch it and the, day you launch it, all of that. Functionality's gonna work. I feel it's been a much more of a sort of trickle approach. oh, okay, this thing got launched and that thing got missed. We punted this until the next version and so on. And I remember hearing great fanfare about block themes and how it was obvious everybody was just gonna move over in fairly short measure.
like you said, we're seven years on, I dunno what the numbers are, but it's not a lot in terms of a percentage that have made the shift.
[00:17:37] Brian Gardner: No. and this is just a great opportunity for, me to talk about the work Mike and Patrick are doing with Ollie because, not only Mike has obviously, a long tenure of WordPress and design. but what they're doing now, and, there's two reasons why I like this. they're building functionality into the Ali and Ali Pro platform.
that is a lot of what people are wishing WordPress included. Now it's great and they're doing it in a way that's just native to WordPress, ui, right? So it doesn't look like you're, like in an outside experience. And huge props to the work that they're doing in terms of. offering some of the controls and settings and just features that we wish WordPress itself had.
they came out with, in speaking to your, menu comment, your navigation comment, they came out with a plugin, maybe six months ago called Ali Menu Designer, and it did two things phenomenally well. One, it provided you the ability to design what's called like a mobile menu experience. So if you have a navigation and a header and click the little icon.
You don't just get this sort of un styled list of pages you can design with blocks, what that screen looks like. So let's start with that. Number two, they also offered. the ability to, with blocks build what we call like the mega menu. So like when you hover something, the links and the whole modal that you know is revealed below that on desktop can be interesting.
Not just, like a sub menu, but like an entire mega menu. And so with that, and I know that they did this with the intention or with the understanding that in open source. Concepts and code can be forked. WordPress project itself took notice and has in part of WordPress 7.0, is now this thing called navigation overlays, which is inspired heavily by, a subset of the, ALI Menu Designer functionality, which now brings.
The ability to, and I've just spent some time over the weekend really digging into it. I've put some patterns into powder. registering this navigation overlay template parts, so where you can enable users to easily build a much better navigation experience. which is definitely something that, WordPress as a whole sort of took shots from, web flows and, framers and squarespaces 'cause those were just so much better.
and so I love to see this sort of progress inside of. at WordPress and it's, thankful, to people like Mike and Patrick who are really pushing the limits to what sort of the Black editor can
[00:20:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting that project got picked up because I've, seen a variety of things attempt. Into that, but there was just something sublimely. Straightforward about that implementation. You, click a little menu, link inside the sidebar, and then this, it just, it pops up.
You're in the block editor, you drop in, I don't know, buttons, a row of buttons or something like that for mobile and, and you're off to the race, and so you build it. in much the way that you would build out a, page or something like that, the UI is exactly the same. Which I suppose then leads me to that is basically the promise of a block theme, isn't it?
Is the capacity to, within WordPress without writing a single line of code, be able to identify a bit of the site that needs to. To be updated, be that, I dunno, a Aing a, WordPress single. So a page or a post or something like that. but then also to open up options with what does my archive look like?
And you open it up and you look at the archive and what is broadly speaking what you've get. There's a. Whole other thing there. but then you save those away, create new ones and what have you. And so that's it really. That is block editing. It's, what is what you get. Visual editor, atomized.
You can click through, adapt your site, see everything changing in real time. is there anything else I've missed there? Is that basically what it is?
[00:21:30] Brian Gardner: there's little things here and there that it does and doesn't do necessarily, but like at a high level. Yeah, that's it. It's just a whole lot more visual from a builder perspective, than it ever used to be. remember with the, the CLA classic editor and, the wizzywig and it, tried to do some things, but I think not only just putting content on a page and designing that, but also the idea of.
Being able to visually build, the templates, stuff like with Genesis, back in the day, it was all code, right? It was basically like you wanted a different layout. If you wanted to offer like a grid layout on a archive page, you had to write a query loop and do stuff that really required code, which was easy to do, and people could Google and find snippets.
the ability now, for somebody who's well versed in the block editor or the site editor can go in and make it look way more like anybody has ever wanted, which then just visually deviates from like a historical loop and things like that. So it makes WordPress sites just look different, and function different in the way that many of these other platforms are doing.
[00:22:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and then you've got this idea, which you alluded to a template part, so I don't know, things like navigation and whatnot where you can drop in bits, which are footers and headers and things like that. And it really does allow you to, create things with great ease. The bit that I don't get is with an hour under your belt.
It's so obvious that is a superior system to building a WordPress theme than the classic way of opening up a text editor and writing a loop and writing all the encapsulating HDML and CSS and all of that. it's so self-evidently superior. It's quicker. You see what you're doing and what have you.
So the bit, that I don't get is why, does, I'm gonna say nobody. That's nonsense. Why? Why do few people use it?
[00:23:25] Brian Gardner: Okay, so the, biggest obvious reason is that they're using something similar, right? So many people are using page builders, or you got elementary, even cadence and just, they're, generate press. there's people who are using things already that do mostly, or. Maybe more than what block editor could do, so they don't have a need to do it.
So that's the first thing. and number two is, I think, and this is the travesty. I think right now, so many people are not doing something today because of something that they experienced or was a hypothesis from five
[00:23:58] Nathan Wrigley: That's
[00:23:59] Brian Gardner: Oh, five years ago. I tried Gutenberg five years ago and it just, it wasn't for me.
So I don't it, but I'm like, if people really understood and there aren't many, but like people like Mike and I, and others in the space who've been following along, like every little incremental step or, issue that's added or just, I've watched the evolution like literally happen in real time of where we were five years ago and where we're at now, and we're so much different.
And so I think a lot of people are making decisions today based on, them dabbling with it five years ago, which was such a long time ago, in terms of this evolution of the editor, if they knew now, what its capabilities were, I think they'd see it differently and there'd be more adoption. But I think people are like, I tried it.
It wasn't for me, so therefore it never will be. And that's a travesty.
[00:24:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I guess also there's just that tyranny of the default. you've got this thing, it's basically hanging together. I'll just keep using it, what's the point in changing anything? Because what we've got works. I, am curious from a business point of view, you, when you began, studio Press and Genesis and all of that, you were, you had a, a.
A marketplace, which felt really well. It was just burgeoning. It was blossoming. People were buying themes left, and centre. People were shipping functionality into themes, which achi, I don't know. You've got a real estate website or something like that, or a portfolio website and this, that, and the other thing.
We don't need to get into why that. Was an interesting idea, but, but the point was there was a market ready for that and you could sell into that and it felt oh, there's all, forgive me for saying these words, but it felt like there was a licence to print money a bit there. You could, definitely make a credible living off themes given that it's so much easier now with the block based themes and really, I think, like I said, an hour behind the wheel.
You're off to the races a little bit. Do. Do you see that there's a business, a credible business there anymore for somebody going into theming? I know you are doing it. I know Mike's doing it. Dunno how difficult it is.
[00:26:06] Brian Gardner: it is tremendously difficult and especially difficult when you haven't done it before and know, one. the ecosystem and how to distribute it. Mike obviously has, experience with, his, just prior. he is been theming for 10, 12, 15 years too. For anybody new? I would say it's nearly impossible.
And I hate to say that 'cause it just sounds very doomsday. But the problem is this one, the like you said, the adoption of block themes in the WordPress space is still very, low. but especially now, back in the Genesis days, Webflow framer, Squarespace, those weren't things, we didn't have Shopify, we didn't have ai, which is like the newest version of that.
to be perfectly honest, I don't have any expectations ever of making a lot of money through my, my powder project, mainly because I just don't think the market is the way that it was. Several or five or 10 years ago, and, which is fine. This is my place to experiment and I sell one here or there. and I'm committed to it.
But, it is a different landscape and I would certainly not suggest to anybody the way that we did back in the day. Oh, you can create a theme or a framework and sell it and make millions of dollars. It, I just don't see it
[00:27:20] Nathan Wrigley: No, and curiously, that was a business which existed. the million dollar theme was a. That was an achievable thing, which is, yeah, in the year 2026 when we're recording this, feels less, likely, let's put it that way. Okay, so I, have this notion, and this just comes from my head really, I, I dunno if this has been widely shared, but the, when, I'm in the block editor, very often I'm experimenting with different block themes and what have you, and, I've drawn the conclusion, do we need themes?
Like a variety of themes or do is what we're really heading for is the target really. Patterns are we, it's hard to understand what I'm trying to say there, but basically what I end up doing is using patterns over and over again in different parts of the, the, templating system built into block themes.
And I find myself doing that more and the sort of theme bit disappears into the background. Got my head, I got my footer, that's done now it's a bunch of patterns. I dunno if that's really off target for what you think.
[00:28:28] Brian Gardner: you have opened a wound that
[00:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh no.
[00:28:32] Brian Gardner: all day and every day. In my head, this is like the bane of my existence, and if you follow me on Twitter, anybody would see over the last several years I've debated the truth in, all of this. And, here's where I've landed other, than. I don't have a real answer.
And the answer really is, it
[00:28:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:28:51] Brian Gardner: I can take a theme and then through the UI or through theme, JSON, do much of what I want it to do, whether I can add fonts, I could change colours, I can do all of the things, create patterns, save them, whatever. I know that because I'm well versed in how this all works.
Now, a user though, And, this is like where it's hard 'cause I'm like, do I want to just create a base theme and then make people learn how to do it? Or do I wanna serve it up on a platter for them? much in the way that we did with Genesis Child themes back in the day, if you wanted a certain look and fonts and colours and a certain thing, and this doesn't even go into whether a child theme should exist anymore.
'cause that's,
[00:29:33] Nathan Wrigley: That's a whole other thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:29:35] Brian Gardner: Yes. It's a whole other thing. And so like where I've landed is, I don't even, I still don't know if I have an answer. Like for myself, I could just use, I just need one theme ever again. But for, if I want to go into the real estate industry and offer product, it has to be a different theme.
'cause I can't put a, 'cause you could probably create 50 different real estate patterns and package them in a theme. And so there's still a place for distribution. And for verticalization and markets and niches to create several themes so that they are just standalone and you can instal them and that industry can, with a few clicks, get what they
[00:30:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. That's interesting. So broadly, I think we're in agreement patterns are a really like solid framework to build the entire thing on. And if it was just you building. Pet project websites with no client in sight, maybe patterns. You need this base theme, headers, foot, whatever the, wrapper is for that.
And then the patterns go in and everybody's happy. But there's still, you think a, a, market out there for a. Wrapping those patterns up in different themes because you can, and they'll immediately be visually obvious to a different client. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's food for thought. I'll, dwell on that
[00:30:57] Brian Gardner: And I can't tell you how many conversations late at night I've had with chat GT, where it basically said you should take powder, fork it, call it something else, and build it for this industry, rather than trying to make a singular theme, have a pattern. 'cause then I'm like, how about I create a plugin that as 7,000 patterns for 50 different industries?
And it's How many people in the real estate space want a pattern library that is for restaurants? So it, gets to a point where I'm like, I've, I'm thoroughly convinced that if anybody were to attack a vertical and create a theme set of patterns, style options and things like that for verticals, that is the way.
now, so like in my head, I'm like powder for this industry, powder for that industry, I'll call different things. The simpl, the simple guy in me, right? The one who embraces simplicity and loves minimalism. I'm like, I just keep coming back to just create a singular base theme, which can work for me again, not for, a real estate person or a restaurateur or something like that.
And so I, have that
[00:31:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there's a lot of overhead in having 50,000 different themes that you've gotta maintain and
[00:32:05] Brian Gardner: yes. We're right back to the
[00:32:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, stay with, just stay with powder. I think that's an awful lot easier. Okay. So you alluded to something there, which was like loads of patterns. I think you said something like 50,000 or something, just.
Bunches of patterns that then drags us inexorably, we can't avoid it. Ai, it's 2026. Everything. Ai, there's an awful lot of preparatory groundwork going into how WordPress might bind to other ais. We don't have a WordPress ai, which I think is the right way of going about it. we bind to other ais, and I'm wondering if the ais in the future will become.
The designer. in other words, you'll do something like instal powder. You'll be able to let the AI have a little poke around, see for itself what's on the page, see how the corners are rounded, not rounded, see what the drop shadows are, like, what's the margin in the spacing. It kind of figures that out for itself.
And then you say, okay, we want a real estate site that kind of has that aesthetic to it. Make us a hero. Make five. Make us a, I dunno, a pricing table, which fits. That feels to me maybe where we're headed. The AI creates the patterns based around some sort of hierarchy of design. maybe that's pie in the sky.
What do you think about that idea?
Yep. I, for starters, I don't think it's pie in the sky 'cause it's already happening. parts of it are currently pie in the sky, but I'm hoping to like, work into how that can look. great opportunity for me to pitch a new product that is being worked on in the WordPress space called Miles. it is, created by Andy Pealing of WordPress fame 20 years back.
[00:33:51] Brian Gardner: we all go away that far back. in fact, I think Andy's the one who wrote the original Buddy Press plugin. so he has a product called Miles. It's, by Miles ai, and what it does is it's basically the bridge between using ai, which you can do now, with Claude and other thing, Hey, Claude is actually really good.
If you say, Hey, design me a landing page for a real estate agent, it'll write the HTML, it'll write the CSS, it'll use JavaScript for animations
[00:34:19] Nathan Wrigley: so annoying. It's that good?
[00:34:23] Brian Gardner: it is. I actually played with it a couple months ago and I was like, wow, this, I, thought it was gonna spit back like a bad jpeg to me.
When it came back, I was like, okay, so here's now the opportunity. But what Andy is doing is he's taking that experience and then basically making and, integrating it with WordPress itself to where you can say, Hey, not only will you design it for me. Translate it into a WordPress theme and into the WordPress block editor to where I can then use the editor to edit the things, change some fonts and move sections around.
and he's working through some bugs. It's still in beta. but I think what you were asking, and this is where I'm really interested, is how do we use Miles or the AI and say, Do all these things, but then put it into Ali or Powder. I know Mike is doing a lot of exploration with Ali ai and I'm really curious next week when we're in town together, to pick his brain on what that looks like.
But if you can create the design in AI and then like somehow push the button to where it goes into your theme of choice, and adopts those naming conventions and variables and all of those things, like that's when. In my opinion as a product person, like the, roof goes off because then you can say, create a real estate site design, make it beautiful and import it into WordPress slash with powder active, 'cause I'm familiar with that theme.
That's a deal that's where I really start to get excited about the possibilities.
[00:35:49] Nathan Wrigley: it's really interesting. So I'm sure you've been surrounded by Doom speakers who have prophesied the demise of WordPress. I can see that path. I can see that is there's a, u there's a version of the universe in which that happens, but I also see a version of the universe in which.
No, we want to use our contact form that we've been using for years and the LMS that we've been using for years. And we don't trust a, an lm, sorry, an LLM to come out with a half decent LMS. There's mixed, acronyms there. but we wanna be able to leverage the AI for the stuff that frankly.
The N point naught, 1% of the population has the capacity to do, and that's designed beautiful stuff. Yes. it to slot into our WordPress website. And, I think, if we can keep that. Excitement go in and we can persuade people not to jump ship and say, why would you throw the baby out with the bath water?
You've got a perfectly functional site. You want it to look different. Yes. You know that AI can do it well. Why don't you get the AI to do it within the system that you've bought and paid for and invested in for the last 10 years?
[00:37:03] Brian Gardner: Yeah, that is, that's exactly what I was just talking about, which is the, because like even miles like it, it puts it into block edit. There's a lot of custom CSS that gets written and it's very much like within its own lane and kind of creates its own theme now. Imagine a world where you can say, I use powder, I use gravity forms, I sell with WooCommerce.
Take this desi, this design, and put it into an environment. And it's hard because you have to, some of these things like gravity forms, you need like a licence key and stuff like that. But imagine like you have the sandbox or the playground where you can set like your, instal up ahead of time and say, I've got my gravity forms.
And then basically say, make this form, which is right now embedded HTML code. Like it. miles is, great with making forms look beautiful, but they're not functional 'cause it's, they're just, markup for now. But if you could say, translate this form in and make it look good with Gravity forms active.
All of a sudden then I think to your point, now we've taken the tool sets that we're used to, or we're using WordPress, the CMS, that it needs to be from a database and, storage perspective, and then using AI to generate designs that are probably far better than including myself. Anybody can come up.
With on their own. So I don't think we're too far from that, depending on, which way you look at it. And I just, things are just going so fast right now. Like it pretty soon. now the, one thing I will call out that's interesting in to say the, our, whatever, I can't think of the right word.
is that. The need for a website is also changing. And when people talk about the doomsday and the demise of WordPress, what they're really saying is certain industries, certain, types of people don't need websites the way that they used to, which isn't, that's different than saying WordPress is dead.
It's just. Certain like influencers don't need a website. They have their social media accounts, and so I think WordPress's market share is going down slightly, not because it's being demise, but also just because the need for a full website that uses its capabilities is also decreasing.
[00:39:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. So there's a couple of points there. So the first one is, I, really like the idea of getting AI to do these, these blo Let's go for patterns. Let's use that word again. I, because with the best one in the world, one of the things that I often think about AI is.
You get into this cycle of talking to it and talking to it and talking to it, and then suddenly you reach this moment and, but you can't figure out how the heck you got there. what was, what happened to get me from that prompt to where I am now. And that could have been half a day. You're talking, you're trying to tweak a design. Where do you even go with that? If that's your website? Like how do you unpick that if you're just doing it minus the CMS, like WordPress, but the idea that in WordPress you could drop this iteration of the design in, okay, give me 15 blocks, let's call them this.
That's V one. There they are. They're stored over there. And then, okay, we'll try those out. And then V two, okay, we'll try those out and what have you. What I'm trying to say is I love the fact that the, WordPress has the scaffold around the edge. It's hard to put it into words, but I think when you're doing anything with ai, you're basically staring into a black box.
The output may be fabulous, but you don't have a clue how it happened, and you've got no way of amending that. Little bit. You know that padding's too much. Let's just tweak it. there's a setting for that in WordPress. You go and find it and you move it. You don't have to communicate one sentence and then wait for an output to get this thing to happen.
It's just a bit of CSS. You just tweak it inside the block editor. There's no question there, really, but I hope you get what I'm saying. I like the fact that what would otherwise be a black box with AI turns into something useful in WordPress.
[00:41:01] Brian Gardner: Yeah. And so I'll put my cards down a little bit here, with how I'm going to use Miles moving forward. as an example, 'cause I'm experimental, I like to play around and understand how things work. and these are, fake numbers, but just to give some illustration. it might take a thousand credits in miles to generate like a beautiful landing page design.
There's a great onboarding experience. It asks you some questions like, what kind of site are you building, blah, blah, blah. and what I realised quickly with Miles, and this is just AI and this is no slam on what Andy's doing, so I know he is working on improving it, it'll cost me a thousand tokens to get the original design, which is like already weeks of my creative.
Things trying to come together. I could very easily then spend another a thousand, 2000, 3000 trying to tweak things like fine tune, hey, change the padding. And the problem is there's some hallucination that takes place where it starts to rebuild other parts of it where I'm like, okay, now you just ruined the other section that we weren't.
And so for starters, and then it costs another thousand or two tokens to then take that design and convert it into a WordPress team, which I'm not gonna ever use anyways. 'cause I'm gonna insist on. Basically building it off of my own structure, like powder, right? So I'm only using, A fraction of what, miles can offer because I don't need it to do the things that'll actually cost me a lot of tokens and monies to do things.
So it's, for me, it's more mainly of Hey, just give me a really great design to start with. And from there I'll then code it remember the PSD to Genesis or the PSD to WordPress theme. I just need the visual thing. 'cause I, that's the part I struggle with. I could easily take that in, carve it up into like my theme within an hour or two.
And so that's the part where I won't have the same problem that others will with ai, which is. I want it to build me a website. Okay. Like how do I customise this? How do I change this? Because I'm unfamiliar with anything other than how to prompt and vibe code and I can't support and update the thing I've built.
And so that's the problem. I think a lot of people who are trying to shortcut the process will, land in, which is, oh, it designed me a website for me, and then I implemented it somehow, but now I can't change it because every time I try to change it, it actually breaks further. And that's the part that I think AI's trying to still
[00:43:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that was the sort of black hole that I was describing. the black box is that you do these things, but you have no capacity to understand how to tweak the one little thing. And if, it is basically built up of margins and padding and background colours and rounded corners and this, that, and the other thing, dropping that into.
The, block editor, you can then begin to tweak those things from your description. That's not probably the way that you are gonna do it, but that is probably the way that I would do it. I would like that, let's say it designs me a full page. I'd like that atomized into the different pattern, rose form of a better word.
We drop those in and we can tweak them as we like, and in that way I can work out where the things are and. God dammit. I'm also learning something about how the web is built. I'm getting an understanding. Okay. That's called padding. Is it that thing that makes it a bit wider there?
That's Oh, okay. That's the thing. And maybe, dare I say it, digging into a bit of HTML along the way, and that is another thing which worries me, is that this beautiful creation, the open web. Is gonna be somewhat hijacked and it'll just be LLMs AI all the way down and no, nobody will be able to see how the heck anything was ever made.
[00:44:30] Brian Gardner: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the problem that Miles is looking to solve. I think you're a great example of somebody who Miles is for, which is do the thing for me, put it into WordPress so then I can take it
[00:44:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:44:41] Brian Gardner: there. and of course, there's some translation things that'll have to take place and Andy, again, is working on making it better and making it, he's, because of his extensive, history with WordPress, he's very like.
Core WordPress centred. So it's not like there's a proprietary backend. It's like it puts it into blocks. And of course, again, front end backend parody is always a little bit of a challenge, especially when you have some of the animation stuff. miles, the animation stuff on the front end is phenomenal.
it's amazing how good these things look out of the box. And still some challenges. again, he's still in beta. I know he's working on it all day every day, look forward to continuing to champion the project for him and using it for my own sake.
[00:45:24] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I'm gonna check that out because honestly, Brian, I have the design skills of a potato. you could put me next to a potato in a contest and there's a high chance the potato will win. just roll it across the keyboard and it might well do something a bit more interesting. but so something like that sounds like music to my ears.
Do, does it go beyond again? Sorry. We're going down the miles. treadmill a little bit. That wasn't the intention, but here we go. does it do other things? can you tell it, for example, to use a query loop to, in your design, we want an archive. Don't just show it as pixels on the page, but the archive, we would like that to be built with a query loop and we want to include this custom post open, things like that.
Does it go that far as well?
[00:46:10] Brian Gardner: I'm, I don't know, like fully because I haven't prompted, I right now, I think my, Andy's working on trying to go from like singular pages to like offering like, we'll call 'em brochure sites. hey, this is a great design. create me like a service page now or contact page. or in this to your question, create me a, blog page that's got, a grid of three, maybe a featured one at top.
My guess is that. The goal is to just allow that it to exist, right? The ability to, basically speak what you want. I want a featured section at the top query loop, basically saying like a loop of one and make it featured. And then below that, a grid of nine. I think it's probably just a matter of time before it gets there.
though I've seen,
yeah. curious thing as well is I suspect that the AI will get to the point where it doesn't even need you to use the WordPress vernacular. You won't even have to say, I dunno, singular or query loop or any of those things. It's just I want there to be, show me all the posts or something and it'll figure out, okay, that's probably a query loop.
[00:47:12] Nathan Wrigley: And on we go. we've reached the sort of 45 minute mark, which is about the sweet spot actually. we'll wrap it up. But is there anything that you came on here that you. Wanted to say that you didn't get a chance to that we could get into in the last few minutes?
[00:47:26] Brian Gardner: honestly, no. I, think it was just to talk about the status of where we're at with block themes, and of course, because of where we're at and because they're tied now to ai, I think where we landed with Miles and started with Ali and, I get to play with my powder theme in between. that's really outside of my job at WP Engine, where I, spend my, space, in which case I'll read into the record the URL of Choice for today, which is powder design. Go and check that out. and I will link in the show notes to anything that we've discussed during the course of the podcast recording. Where can people find you, Brian? Apart from Powder Do Design, is there a space where you hang out a social network where you, dune scroll?
I doom scroll and have been since 2006. Twitter, I'm gonna always call it Twitter slash x, but yeah, be Gardner there. I also do some stuff over on LinkedIn now.
[00:48:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:48:22] Brian Gardner: so you can go to my, website, brian gardner.com. I've got social icons, in the footer. You can connect any way anyone prefers,
[00:48:30] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to those in the show notes as well. I'd be kinda curious to know how many minutes of my life hours, maybe weeks even. I have doom scrolled on Twitter, but I fear that wouldn't be a good statistic to know. Brian Gardner, thank you for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.
[00:48:46] Brian Gardner: Thank you, Nathan.
[00:48:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's all we've got for you today. If you've got any commentary on that, head to wpbuilds.com. Search for episode number 4 6 4. Leave us a comment there.
Don't forget, This Week in WordPress is not on until the end of April because of the foray into WordCamp Asia, and a little bit of a trip around India for me after that.
One very last thing. Again, if you're into the idea of getting your product or service out in front of our WordPress specific audience, wpbuilds.com/advertise to find out more.
I hope to see you next week for the podcast episode, but you stay safe. I'm gonna fade in some cheesy music and say bye-bye for now.
