[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 468 entitled Marcus Burnette launches utility plugin suite called WellPlayedWP. It was published on Thursday, the 14th of May, 2026.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we begin the podcast with Marcus, just a few short bits of housekeeping. It's the same as I normally do, but here we go anyway.
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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Marcus Burnette. He's been on This Week in WordPress many, many times before. I've met him in person, as you will no doubt hear in the episode.
And during today, we're talking about something new that Marcus has launched. It's called WellPlayedWP, and it's a suite of 22, well, I'm going to call them utility plugins. So they're smaller plugins, which typically do one thing, and they are arranged across WordPress generally, but also more specifically Elementor and WooCommerce.
So we talk about why Marcus built this suite. The membership model where you pay once and get everything in one membership. What plugins are in there. And also we stray into some other projects that Marcus has been busy with as well, like The WP World, and also the Wapuu game, which I've got a copy of and actually got me stopped at airport Security. I don't think we go into that, but nevertheless it did.
That is all coming up next, and I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Marcus Burnette. Hello, Marcus.
[00:03:43] Marcus Burnette: Hey Nathan. Thanks for having me.
[00:03:44] Nathan Wrigley: You are so welcome. Marcus has been on the, this week in WordPress show.
I haven't enough fingers or toes to count that number, but I reckon it's well into the maybe 30 something like that. Appearances. so I'm very grateful to Marcus. I've known him for many years. We've met at Word camps and things like that, but he is got something new, which he's launching into the WordPress space, however.
Before we get into that, let's do the, let's do the potted bio, shall we, Marcus, tell us a little bit about you. Maybe focus on the WP world. That might be a good way to prize open what your relationship is with WordPress, but also where you work and things like that.
[00:04:24] Marcus Burnette: All the things. All of those things. Yeah. Happy to do that. yeah. So I'm Marcus Burnette. My full-time day job is, at Bluehost. I lead a couple of teams who build, websites for customers, over at Bluehost. and I've been in WordPress for, so my, my, my actual building WordPress sites, goes back probably about a decade now, but really more in the community over the last, I would say, five or six years really, Really plugged in during COVID, didn't have anybody else to see. So jumped in online and became part of the, part of the, WordPress community online pretty heavily right around that time. yeah. And then the WP world actually spawned out of that community, that community times. So I jumped in, realised how.
Wonderfully large and, wonderfully helpful and kind the community is, and wanted to figure out a way that I could give back to the community. And the WP world, spawned out of that. It's a directory of sorts of folks in the WordPress space, but also lists all of the. Word camps and, WordPress type events that, that are happening across the globe for people to go and see.
And there's a number of other resources there, and I continue to try and, grow it in its, benefit back to the WordPress community. so that's, that's me in in nutshell.
[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: that's great. You should go and check it out. If you are listening to this and you're anywhere near a keyboard, just press pause after I've said the URL. Don't pause now. it's the. WP World. It's a pretty cool URL, the WP world. and Marcus, in his usual way is really playing down what it is.
it's the place, I would say it's supplanted. I think many other places where you might have been, if you wanna know what's going on. Then that's the place to do it. You can set up a profile and become part of that community, but also you can just use it as a resource for finding out things that are going on.
But it's, much wider than just the things that are going on in the, real world. And, subscribe to the newsletter as well. and you'll receive
[00:06:43] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, the.
[00:06:44] Nathan Wrigley: updates for what's going on. Yeah.
Yeah.
[00:06:48] Marcus Burnette: The, goal wasn't necessarily to supplant other communities. In fact, there are a number of ways that you can mark in the WP world what other communities you're a part of. the goal is really to allow folks in the WordPress space to connect with each other in any of the ways that they are in the same communities together.
[00:07:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. The word supplant there was definitely the wrong choice, wasn't it? I get what you mean
it. It
[00:07:11] Marcus Burnette: fine.
[00:07:12] Nathan Wrigley: a default when it becomes so good and useful and there's so much info in there, it becomes the default and that was certainly the case for me. If I, need to know something about when things are happening, that's basically where I'm gonna go and a raft of other things.
So that's how it's evolved and, yeah, beautiful philanthropic effort. As I said, go check it out. However. on the, this weekend WordPress show yesterday. So we recorded one on Monday, the 4th of May. we featured the, thing that we're gonna talk about today, which again, pause and go to this URL.
Wait for it. Don't hit pause yet. Go to well played WP com. It's all as one word. No hyphens or anything like that. played. wp.com. Go check it out. And the reason we mentioned it is because it was new and anything that's new and interesting we talk about on that show. But we, ended up trying to figure out how busy you were.
we decided that you are the, busiest man in WordPress because Michelle Ette, she gets the award for the busiest woman in WordPress. And there was a bit of a discussion about who was. Busier, but you definitely are not stopping. So your full-time job at Bluehost, I know that you've got like a whole family structure going on there and what have you, so you know there's enough going on with the Bluehost job and the family and then you've got the WP world already.
You definitely 10 x in what I do there. And because there was probably a few minutes available each week, you just launch. Launch. played. wp.com. I don't know where you get the time. do you just, first of all, tell us about that. Honestly, that's, I'm not, I'm, laughing at all.
But seriously, do you get any rest? Do you actually sit down and relax?
[00:09:11] Marcus Burnette: occasionally, I, actually don't, I don't know where the time comes from. It is a lot of late nights and, weekends and, working on some of these things. After, the rest of the family has gone to bed, the whole world is relatively quiet. And I can focus in on some things, but, yeah, I don't know that I'm catching up to Michelle anytime
[00:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno
[00:09:33] Marcus Burnette: but I am, busy at the moment and well played is the second most recent thing that I've launched. And I have another thing launching this
[00:09:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Hang
[00:09:43] Marcus Burnette: quite bi, quite busy.
[00:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: Before we finish, definitely, let's talk about that as well, because you know so seriously though, are you more of a doer? Are you not the kind of person that sits in front of the TV at the end of the day and relaxes in that way? Do you rather I don't know, be busy and constructive and doing things
[00:10:04] Marcus Burnette: yeah, it's a bit of both. I do enjoy some TV time as well to just unwind. but I do, I just love creating stuff and the, tooling that we have available to us now. and I was talking to someone about this who actually isn't in the WordPress space, but just from, so the project I'm launching this week is one that I ran about five or six years ago and shut down.
And I'm relaunching it. but the tooling from that time to now in terms of what we have to be able to create on the web, but also how far CSS and JavaScript has come and what's available. what's possible. To do on the web now is different. obviously my skillset from what I was able to do 10 years ago versus what I've learned in the last 10 years to be able to do something now.
So all of those things have combined into a space right now where I feel like there's just so much opportunity to create so really cool stuff online that I just want to take advantage of it while I, while I
[00:11:09] Nathan Wrigley: I know what you mean there. There's something, so I'm like you, I love tinkering around on the internet. I'm nowhere near as productive as you, but I, enjoy tinkering around, but a lot of my hobby projects are just things that are really, nobody will ever see. They're not public facing, but I enjoy that tinkering process.
However. I have some friends who are like really seriously into things like carpentry and there is a big bit of me, which really, wishes that I had a, hobby which produced actual real world objects because you go into their houses and you think, look at this house. It's so magnificent and, actually you weigh it up.
And I'm probably spending as much time on these, online things as they are with their carpentry. But there's a real disconnect with the, the sort of slightly dishevelled nature of my house. And they're, perfect houses. And I don't know if, I don't know if any of that sort of robs you in the, in, in the wrong direction or anything, but that's, that is something that I think is not tangible to anybody else.
and sometimes I wish it was more tangible. You build these things online, your friends and your family don't get to see them. And sometimes you think, oh, I am being busy. Honestly, I'm being productive.
[00:12:20] Marcus Burnette: Yeah. there's a counter counterpoint there, right? The only, way you're going to see those carpentry pieces is if you go to their house, where if you build something online, you can share it with, thousands and thousands of people. But there are also opportunities to do tangible things, which is why, I created the, Unleashed, the Wpu cards.
It was something that I felt like I was able to do and, actually. Produced a tangible product that, I was able to get into people's hands and, they're able to, play with those. I know that you have a
[00:12:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I got it right behind
me. I was just pointing to it over there.
[00:12:59] Marcus Burnette: there is the opportunity to create real, tangible things even with the, with the skillset on the
[00:13:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Fun story. A bit of an aside. I, was with, Marcus at WordCamp us. I, it is probably 18 months ago or something like that. And, we were having a chat and the intention from my side was to have a chat about, I don't know, sponsoring WP Bills or something like that.
However, in, a remarkable twist of fate, Marcus, within about three minutes, managed to, Managed to get me to, buy his card game. I don't know quite how my guard got let down so quickly, but it turned from a conversation. You skillfully, got
[00:13:39] Marcus Burnette: Which, which also wasn't
my
[00:13:41] Nathan Wrigley: no. It was great though.
[00:13:42] Marcus Burnette: to show you the game and. Get your feedback on whether you thought it was something interesting or not and
[00:13:48] Nathan Wrigley: good. And there it is sitting behind me right now. So there's yet another reason why you're a busy person. You do card games in your spare time as well. Okay. Let's get to the
subject at hand. So well played wp uh.com. if you actually look at the logo, it's called and really struggling to say that word for some reason.
I don't know why. played WordPress plugins. Beautiful site by the way. Full of lovely colours. And it's very dark on my, I dunno if it's like dark mode 'cause I adopt that. but it's
[00:14:20] Marcus Burnette: No, it is fairly dark.
I,
[00:14:23] Nathan Wrigley: dark by default.
[00:14:24] Marcus Burnette: a lot of light websites and I decided I wanted to just do
[00:14:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's really nice
[00:14:28] Marcus Burnette: darker with it.
[00:14:29] Nathan Wrigley: you're gonna learn quickly what this is, essentially at the moment.
caveat mTOR. I suspect this number will go north at the minute. It says Get access, get instant access to all 22. played. Plugins for one simple membership built for WordPress builders who want practical tools under a single licence. So you've got 22 individual plugins wrapped inside of a membership system.
What's prompted this then? Like why did you decide to do this?
[00:15:01] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, absolutely. so 22 right now, when I launched the site, I want to say a week and a half, couple weeks ago, it was at, 18 or 19. So I've already added a, few in the last couple of weeks. But, yeah, I really, over the course of the last. Year, and a half, I would say maybe. and, maybe it, yeah, it aligns with the, amount of time that I've been in the role that I am at Bluehost helping, our customers build their websites.
we've had to solve for a number of use cases where I didn't feel like there was the right plugin that already existed. and I started to amass a little bit of a library of plugins for. Projects that we've built or, projects that I've built. Some of the, I do a little bit of freelance work here and there and, have to build a, little plugin every now and then for those things.
And so started to, have a bit of a collection of plugins just sitting on my computer begging for some reason to not just be on the computer, in a silo. And Started to take a look around and see what the, options were. I have released a couple of plugins on the.org repository.
I felt like these had. I don't wanna say more value than being for free, but I felt like they provided some value that I, thought that somebody might be interested in paying for. And at the same time, the.org repository. Review process had just gotten so far backed up, with just hundreds and hundreds of plugins waiting to be reviewed, that at one of, one at a time, if I were to, add 15 plugins to the repository, it was gonna take a.
I don't know, up upwards of, 18 months to a year to get them into the repository. And I didn't wanna wait that long. I wanted to, get these plugins off my computer and out in front of the, the WordPress space. And so I thought. Why don't I just go ahead and why don't I just go ahead and start a plugin
[00:17:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because
[00:17:17] Marcus Burnette: right?
Like as one does. yeah, I had the plugins. I, tried to figure out what I could do to differentiate myself from the other plugin shops that are out there, besides just creating plugins that are different from what the other plugin shops are offering. And decided to just go with a single licence membership type thing.
you can come and come to the site, pay for, one licence and get access to the entire library of plugins. And like, you said, they'll continue to grow, over time as well.
[00:17:57] Nathan Wrigley: So we might as well just do the pricing quickly before we get into it. 'cause that's, it's interesting looking at your pricing page that we will, you'll see the interesting bit in a minute. The, so it's a, single site licence is gonna be $90. That's an annual subscription and there's no kind of.
There's no individual purchase of anything. You just, get the lot basically, and that allows you to ship whatever you've got on that one site. Then there's a 10 site option, which you know, speaks for itself exactly the same, only with a zero on the end. So 10 sites instead of one site. That's four 90.
So five x the price of one for 10 times the number of sites. And then this one is curious, and I'm always fascinated by how people decide to price things. So it'd be interesting to talk about this one actually. You've got the unlimited, which I guess is literally that. So you've got, there's no limit.
that's 1,490. So in, in effect, it's the same price as 30 sites. Basically only you've gone for the unlimited option. you happy with that? Is that working out? All right? Are you shifting more of one or more of the other? And the unlimited thing, I think is what's curious to me because I'm always. I never quite know how people decide on the pricing.
Was this, long and hard thought through, or was it more of a put your finger in the air and have a bit of a guess at this point?
[00:19:23] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, both. it's, I, definitely took a look at what other, plugin shops were doing there to see, For, pricing. So what, it ended up falling on is, who's the audience for these? you've got folks that are, just building their own site. Maybe they're an internal developer for a company or something.
They just need the one site. Then you have the freelancer that is building. Multiple sites or even, there's a developer who, they work with a company and the company has three sites or four sites or whatever, and they need those plugins on each of those sites. So it's a little bump up there for that.
And then really have the agencies who are doing, tens to hundreds of sites for clients. and those were the, three places that I, landed for at least figuring out what the different site. Package breakdowns were one 10 and unlimited. 'cause I could say 500, but it's at what point is 500 basically
[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Do you know what's curious? I'm in the middle, near the end of, launching a SaaS product in the podcasting space, and this piece of the jigsaw is the hardest. Bit the pricing bit. All the other bits make sense because you you, build this feature or in your case you build a plugin and you add it to the directory and that's fairly straightforward trying to figure this bit out and decide, okay, what's the value of that?
What will make it appealing and attractive? I find that really hard. I should have said at the beginning, and I failed to do it and it was definitely my intention to put this at the beginning. There is a founder's price, so we are recording this right at the beginning of May, and maybe you can give us some intel as.
To how long this is gonna last, but, currently on the website, dose prices are all, there's a 50% off discount basically. So I am gonna ask the question, does that represent 50% off what I've just read out loud, or does it mean that they'll go up by a hundred percent after that introductory founding period has passed?
[00:21:38] Marcus Burnette: those are the, full price. So it's actually 50% off of what the prices are that
[00:21:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So in that case, sorry, during the founding price, it'll be more like $45. but half of what I said essentially. Sorry. How long will that last? Do you know?
[00:21:56] Marcus Burnette: I am currently planning on running that through the end of May. but I have had a couple of, these podcast type things that are not coming out until a little bit later in May. And so I probably will run it into June a bit for folks that don't get a chance to hear about it until, there's a couple days left in May.
so li likely to run it into June a little bit anyways.
[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: one will be dropping before then. So if anybody's listening to this and what have you, then hopefully you'll be able to get that. I should also say there's a monthly option as well, if you prefer to do that. it's the usual kind of, if you pay annually, it looks to me, pa, the figures, it looks like you get the year for 10 months, basically, if you pay annually.
It's something along those lines as well.
[00:22:39] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, I, was gonna say in, when it comes to the pricing, I actually looked at what the monthly pricing that felt right for me was first, and then essentially just multiplied that by 10 for each of the annual prices. Not a whole lot of, algorithmic thought went into the annual pricing so much as what do I think is a comfortable price for, for, monthly, for one site, 10 sites and unlimited.
And then once I felt like I had settled on a, fairly decent number there, then I. Essentially multiplied that by 10 to, to get the annual pricing. And then with the 50% off, you're basically getting 12 months for four or five
[00:23:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. That's, a good deal. That's well, described. I like that. okay, let's get into it. I'm gonna use the word eclectic. That's my, that's gonna be my word here. very often when I've seen these kind of membership things, it's very much bolted to a thing. we've got.
Plugin houses that just do, I don't know, extensions to WooCommerce, which obviously we'll see in a minute. You do. But that's all that they do, right? there's limitations and constraints on what they do. Or it might be, I don't know, things to do with a particular LMS or something like that. It feels like you are going for more.
eclectic, like I said, things which, at the moment seem to be, word pressy things, elemental things, and WooCommerce things. So you've got those three broad categories, but it does feel to me as if there's not. I don't know. You can tell me if I'm wrong. It feels to me as if you are not gonna limit yourself in that way.
If, a curious idea comes up, and you think you can, I don't know, put it together in the space of time required, it feels to me that there's not gonna be a constraint. if you get in now, maybe a year from now, there'll be 50 eclectic different things. Is that the approach or have I misrepresented that?
[00:24:42] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, no, that's pretty accurate. I think, obviously the WordPress plugins, I don't know if WordPress counts as a category, but Elementor and WooCommerce are two of the tools that I use most on top of WordPress. And by just the sheer nature of having already had some, Elementor in WooCommerce, plugins created for, solutions that I needed for myself, they ended up in those buckets. that wasn't necessarily an intentional target of Elementor and WooCommerce. They're just plugins I already had for those. they ended up in, in those buckets. But yeah, it's, basically anything it, anything WordPress related, that I feel like there's not a great solution for essentially.
my, my goal isn't to. Take plugins that already exist and recreate them. I'm certainly not building, large learning management system plugins or form plugins. There's great options out there for those things. I'm not trying to take that over. the, goal here is to create a. Library of plugins that are more than a code snippet, right?
there's plenty of stuff that you can do in WordPress by just grabbing 15 lines of code and pasting 'em into a code snippets managing plugin. And off you go. or into your functions, PHP or whatever, however you wanna add snippets to your site. these are more than that. Intentionally. a, bit more than just something where you could copy and paste some code into your site, but not quite to the size of, like I said, not rebuilding a commerce platform or anything like that.
They're, they're not these monumental flagship, plugins in many cases. like you saw already for Elementor and WooCommerce. They're add on. Slightly larger than a, than a code snippet add on to those things to extend the flagship products, or again, some standalone WordPress stuff that doesn't require necessarily one of those.
so that, that sweet spot in the middle there and. While, I don't know all of the, I don't even know what number we're up to now, 60,000, 70,000 plugins in the repository, although I don't know everything that's in there. I'm also not trying to step on the toes of what's going on in there as well. So if there are great plugins in there that take on tasks that are, before us.
I'm I'd recommend you use those first. But if there's something that I haven't seen a solution for, or the solution that I've seen is, not feature rich enough, then that's exactly the kind of sweet spot space that I'm looking for, this collection of plugins. So if you look at what I have in there now, it's mostly stuff that I.
And I'm fairly, again, I don't know all the tens of thousands of plugins, but I know a fair number of the most used ones. and so the things that I have in there now are not things that I've seen elsewhere, either in the repository or, paid plugins from others.
[00:28:13] Nathan Wrigley: I quite like the idea of having this sort of eclectic marketplace of different things where there's really no how to describe it. There's no limits on you, on what you can put in there if a, if an interesting idea comes along, but, oh, but we're a WooCommerce plugin. Shop, then you oh, yeah, let's not do that then.
But here you've got carte blanche to do what you like and also I think dropping some curious ones in might, might be of interest over time. And I'm guessing that this collection will grow. Let's just run through a few of them to give you some flavour of what's going on. So I'll just do the six, which are in there at the moment.
And I'll just read out the. The, the title of them and hopefully that will give enough away 'cause most of them have got a title which, explains exactly what they do. So check out trust badges would be one. commerce category, order reply draughts, simple price per code test, payment gateway, and thank you redirects, by the way, this is all on well played wp.com/plugins.
Like a, card layout of all of these with a, button where you can, find out a little bit more. So that's the, WooCommerce side. And then on the elemental side, there's six again at the moment. Advanced loop editor, that's to do with a CF, build a CSS manager, gallery grid, pro loop query, table shape dividers plus and ultimate heading suite.
So, far, so utility, if All of them Tackle a particular thing and then in this cannot categorise as WooCommerce or Elementor. We've got WordPress. And actually, to be honest with you, this is the bit that's most of interest to me because I'm, I haven't typically used Elementor and I don't typically use WooCommerce.
So all of these are interesting. So I'll. Dip into these a little bit more where I feel that there's need classroom library, a classroom library plugin to catalogue books and create a check-in checkout system for students. Yeah. I love it, but it's so interesting.
[00:30:18] Marcus Burnette: that. That one came out of a need for actually my wife, who's a middle school English teacher, language arts teacher. And so she has a library full of books. what makes that one particularly fun is it connects to the open library.org, API and we have one of those, barcode scanner
[00:30:36] Nathan Wrigley: gone things. Yeah.
[00:30:37] Marcus Burnette: And so you can scan the barcode on the book and it'll actually look up all of the book information for you.
And so when you're adding your books to the library, you can type in the barcode or the ISBN number and it'll actually go look up the book information with cover and summary of the book and author and all of that
[00:30:54] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. Do, you
[00:30:57] Marcus Burnette: yeah, it makes adding things to your library very easy.
[00:31:01] Nathan Wrigley: I've got this real for education and public schools. I, dunno what it's like in the us I'm gonna imagine it's the same. they're basically massively underfunded and everything is done on a shoestring and many of the tech solutions, which would be so brilliant for.
Public education are just priced out. they, simply can't afford them. So things like that I think is lovely. I'm gonna encourage you to, get in touch with your wife more and ask what the heck they need at their school. And it'd be really interesting to see those
[00:31:36] Marcus Burnette: Yeah. The, we, don't need to get into it here, but the, the site that I'm launching later this week is in the education space, so
[00:31:45] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, maybe just before we, and before you and I depart after we've clicked record, switched it off, maybe, maybe it'd be interesting to chat about that. Okay. So let's go through the next one. font or some dash icons. There's not much to say there. I guess Google login for existing users.
Again, fairly straightforward image, Opti, I, can't even say this word, image Optimiz eight, I think is how you say that. And, you are using swoosh, which is where I always go to squash my images. This is a, it's an online website. I guess they've got an API or something like that. I didn't realise
[00:32:20] Marcus Burnette: So they don't have an API, that was the route that I was going to go. But swoosh is actually built on top of an open source, image optimization library. So I'm just using the same, open source library that swoosh is.
[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you can do multiple things at once. Can, you can queue things like, I dunno, your entire media library or when things are uploaded to the media library, it'll handle that in a queue. It sounds like that's what you've built.
[00:32:45] Marcus Burnette: Yes, there is huge bulk processing. with that particular library. The server does have to have node js installed, so there's a little bit of, if you do have the underlying technology required, you can queue them up. If you don't, you have to leave your browser window open and it'll still do
[00:33:02] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.
Oh, I see. You are
[00:33:05] Marcus Burnette: works still, but
[00:33:06] Nathan Wrigley: the native image browser capabilities to do that if no JS is not in. Yeah. That seems that's, a great idea. that yeah. Yeah. And obviously if you switch it on in the future, maybe it can handle that as the image is getting uploaded into the media library through the.
[00:33:24] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, that's actually already part of it. I use that on, my sites now and it'll convert, it'll squash and convert to web p any of the JPEGs and, PNGs that I upload directly during upload, and so I don't have to go
[00:33:39] Nathan Wrigley: And it does it via the browser, so you don't need to have some sort of
[00:33:42] Marcus Burnette: It does.
[00:33:42] Nathan Wrigley: thing. Okay. Brilliant.
[00:33:44] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, it's not sending it off and, bringing it back.
It's doing it
Right. in the browser.
[00:33:48] Nathan Wrigley: it in the space of time. It takes you to blink as well, which is fairly amazing. Yeah. Anyway, we are getting bogged down in that one, aren't we? 'cause it's so interesting. landing page countdown. I'm sure you can figure that out. Mark down Block editor. I'm gonna just read the blurb for that one at a native markdown block to the WordPress block Editor with file, import preview mode and secure front-end rendering.
Not a markdown user. Myself, I know. Almost everybody that I know is and loves it. For some reason, it's not for me, but I'm sure people can figure out why that's,
[00:34:19] Marcus Burnette: So I actually built that one for the Well-played WP site. all of the documentation that I have for each of these plugins is in markdown, and so to have a great way to put that on the front end of the site, I created this block. And so now I just add the markdown block. Import the markdown file into it and hit save, and it con converts
[00:34:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's nice.
[00:34:44] Marcus Burnette: that it needs to.
[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: If you're a, if you're
[00:34:46] Marcus Burnette: so that one actually came out of the need for
this exact site.
[00:34:49] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, That's good. I, dunno, it's just never jelled with me. I've always just liked typing and then going back through and highlighting and H two and things like that. I dunno what that is. I dunno why I can't seem to get my brain into gear with markdown.
But anyway, there you go. the next one is, multi email login. mul this enables users to associate multiple email addresses with a single account. Could be quite handy. short code Galaxy, gives the site admins a practical set of utility short codes without forcing them to load on every request.
Go on, lay out some of the things that's in there. 'cause that feels like there's, that's a whole thing all of itself.
[00:35:28] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, this was a, this is a spiral, of a thought from the, short code or whatever that people put in the footer that says copyright, whatever the date is. And so I needed a short code that said copyright. Pull in the current year and then whatever other text, and then I was like, you know what, there's lots of other short codes that people need.
there's all sorts that pull in post information and page information from the page that you're on. all sorts of site information you can pull in things that have been in, stored in, options values. So it's basically a library. I wanna say there's. 50 or 60 short codes in there, all with attributes that you can use to, even modify the short codes themselves.
but each short code has a, its own little short code builder inside. So when you click on it, it gives you the. The, fields for whatever attributes are available, and you just fill them in and hit copy short code, and it gives you the
[00:36:28] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, with all the
[00:36:29] Marcus Burnette: short code that you need with all the attributes that, and then you can paste that in where
[00:36:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I love that because when you go to a documentation page and it says, here's the short code, and then there's 800 words of, and here's the attributes, and
[00:36:42] Marcus Burnette: Yeah.
[00:36:43] Nathan Wrigley: would be helpful if, if there was an easy way to actually add the attributes that I need so that I don't know.
[00:36:49] Marcus Burnette: these are all ones that I, That, that don't come bundled in with WordPress that I felt were generic enough though, that you would want to maybe use them. so you can use them inside of the admin area there, there's all the short code and you can toggle them off as well, so you're not loading a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need.
You can toggle on and off whichever short codes you want to use or just let it ignore. and then there's actually a. Little Galaxy icon that's on the short code Gutenberg block, or full site editing block. So you can click on it and it'll open up the short code Galaxy Library and editor all within your page editing experience.
So you don't have to jump back and forth. You can go ahead and add it right in there and hit, move on to the
[00:37:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a, lovely one. I could see myself making use of that. Okay. And here we've got a couple of new ones, which have been added since the middle of April, so a couple of weeks ago really. first one is smart redirect Manager, so I'm sure you can figure that out. But it's create visual rule based, redirects based upon things like role device schedule, country UTM, cookie.
Conditions. I'm sure we can figure out what that does, but yeah. And then the last one, the one that we, haven't mentioned is, WP Lifeline. So this is Emergency Recovery Dashboard for WordPress Restore Admin access, disabled Failing Plugin Switch themes. Add a, add an export, sorry, and export a full recovery package.
When WP admin is unstable or broken. What? What? What's this one? This is curious because doesn't I, thought that WP by itself did a few of those bits and pieces, not obviously a dashboard, but the recovery parts. Tell us more. What was the thinking here?
[00:38:35] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, usually something breaks. You get the, WordPress has experienced an issue, check your email message or whatever. this one kind of came out of a need for, a specific use case, but then I built it out to be a little bit more of a suite. WP LifeFlight is one of those that you wanna instal before you need
[00:38:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's
[00:39:00] Marcus Burnette: once the site is crashed, that's, not the best time. So it's a preventative plugin that then gives you some access when something goes wrong. so you instal the plugin, you actually get a unique URL that you wanna save away somewhere, one password or. Whatever. and then when something happens to your site, it crashes, whatever you go to that URL, it loads before the WP admin would load.
And so you get a dashboard that then gives you lots of options to do different things. So enabling and disabling plugins, either one at a time or wholesale is in there. same goes for themes. You have the ability to add a user there. And that was where, that was the use case that came out of, for, me was there was, a client who, they were at one agency, their site, they, decided to hire, left them, hire a different agency or whatever, couldn't get in, didn't have access to the site, and didn't know the admin password and whatever.
And so from this dashboard you can. Reset password for any user, but you can also create another admin user from the dashboard, and that way you can get back into your site and all of that. And then, there's also lots of MySQL and PHP logs there, so you can see what's going on in the logs, which sometimes those are a little bit harder to, to access
depending on what you're, what your server setup
[00:40:27] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that is interesting. Yeah, that, that's where the
[00:40:30] Marcus Burnette: Basically an E
[00:40:31] Nathan Wrigley: it? Yeah.
[00:40:32] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, an emergency dashboard. When something, when something goes wrong or something's not going wrong, but you don't have access to your site and you need to figure out how to get back in.
[00:40:42] Nathan Wrigley: really curious. What an interesting idea. currently as of the 5th of May, 2026, there are 22. On the website, if you wait a couple of weeks, there'll be like 806.
[00:40:55] Marcus Burnette: No, not that many.
[00:40:56] Nathan Wrigley: No, sorry, that was, e even you are not that productive. 804.
[00:41:03] Marcus Burnette: I've got a, I've got a few sitting around waiting for me
[00:41:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, have you,
[00:41:07] Marcus Burnette: not that
[00:41:07] Nathan Wrigley: you know what's really nice about this now?
Anytime you get an itch to scratch and you, can do it and then chuck it in here and make your membership site more valuable, which is, I think that's really nice. And the fact that you've not constrained it to any bit of WordPress, and as I said, it's just this eclectic blend of plugins to do an eclectic bunch of tasks.
I think that's. That, that to me would make it interesting In the long term, you're not binding yourself to one particular idea or product or whatever it may be. So there we go.
[00:41:39] Marcus Burnette: Yep. And, you never know as a, someone who has a licence, what, new thing will show
up that,
[00:41:47] Nathan Wrigley: that was gonna
[00:41:47] Marcus Burnette: maybe even, didn't even know you
[00:41:50] Nathan Wrigley: That was gonna be my final question. Do you, are you open to ideas? If somebody were to come along and they were a member, let's couch it in those terms. are you interested in those kind of conversations and people talking about things that you might add in? Yeah.
[00:42:07] Marcus Burnette: a hundred percent. I'm all, ears for people that have some, thoughts and ideas for, what, what they might wanna see in the library. One, clarify, I guess just real quick, how, this works. and so when you, sign up for a membership, you get a. played WP Library plugin download.
and so that's what you'll take with you from, site to site. You'll instal the library plugin and the site, attach the licence key to it, and, then you'll essentially, within that site, have access to the entire library so you're not jumping back and forth between the well played website.
Downloading a, downloading a, plugin, installing it on the site. It's all within the site from that library plugin. It does all of the background checks for updates and all of that stuff. So all your plugins stay up to date. so that's how that works. So things will just show up inside of that library from time to time
[00:43:09] Nathan Wrigley: Got it. So you
[00:43:10] Marcus Burnette: new items are added.
[00:43:11] Nathan Wrigley: keys for 22 individual products or 35 or whatever the site are. You just got this one plugin, a single licence key, and you're off to the races. Okay. Yeah,
[00:43:23] Marcus Burnette: off to the races. Yeah. One of the, non, non actual library plugin features that I also just added, last week was you can tie your wordpress.org username to a licence now that you would do through the website. If you tie it to the licence, then what happens is in addition to all of the library plugins showing up inside of that.
That panel in, your website, there's also a tab that'll show you all of your favorited wordpress.org plugins, and so you can then also one click instal all of them within the website without having to jump around and all of that as well.
[00:44:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's interesting.
[00:44:02] Marcus Burnette: You can do that now by putting in your username in the, if you go to, just to instal a plugin, there's a favourites tab there and you can put in your, but I feel like you're putting in your username over and over again.
If you tie it to the licence. Then you don't have to ever put it in. It'll just show up and show you all your favourite plugins
[00:44:19] Nathan Wrigley: is a neat idea. Yeah. Yeah. okay. So we've hit the sweet spot. In terms of time, I think we've probably done a, fairly good job of explaining what it is. I will just say, the URL one more time. played wp.com is where you're gonna find it. 22 plugins. Currently 5th of May when we're recording this, this'll definitely go out before the, the June possible deadline, so hopefully you'll be able to take advantage of the 50% off.
do you wanna just quick, very quickly tell us about this thing that you're dropping this week in the education space, or is that better done after we stop record?
[00:44:59] Marcus Burnette: no, probab, I assume probably by the time this goes out that it'll be launched, so I might as well share. it's called flip quiz. I actually ran. I ran the, site from 2014 to 2019, and then shut it down. there's a whole article online why I shut it down. but, I think that it's so very, briefly What it is, it's basically Jeopardy style games for the classroom.
So many, classrooms at this point have screens at the front of the class, so you can load the Jeopardy board up on the screen and play. play Jeopardy style games for quiz reviews and all of that, but also works for trivia game nights at a bar or whatever. It's not limited to the classroom necessarily, but that's the target audience.
And so I felt like now with AI and all of the things that we have, one, there's a lot more that I can build because of that tooling, but there's also a lot more that I can offer inside of the platform because of that tooling that I couldn't before. And the more my wife and I talked about that and the possibility of that in the classroom and what's available to us now for making.
Really just making life easier for teachers to be able to, engage their students and study in the classroom at the same time. The, more excited we got about, bringing it back.
[00:46:28] Nathan Wrigley: that's so
[00:46:29] Marcus Burnette: been working on that for the last couple of weeks and, should be launching that this week. It's called Flip
Quiz.
[00:46:35] Nathan Wrigley: eight millisecond gap that you've got, on next Thursday or something like that. That's really interesting. So there's a more, educational spin to some of the endeavours that you're doing as well. Gosh. Marcus, it is time for you to go and lay down.
I feel that you've been awake for far, too many weeks in a row.
[00:46:54] Marcus Burnette: You're probably right.
[00:46:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. as I said URL one more time, played wp.com. Go check it out. And Marcus is available online. where's the best place to reach out to you?
[00:47:07] Marcus Burnette: Probably the best places. on, Twitter is where I'm most active. Marcus d Burnette on Twitter. you can find me on the WP world, and you can find all of the other places that I'm available just by searching for my name on the WP world.
[00:47:24] Nathan Wrigley: in which case I will bid you a dear. Have a lovely day. Enjoy your downtime, whatever that means, and I'll speak to you soon. No doubt. Thanks, Marcus.
[00:47:33] Marcus Burnette: Thank you so much, Nathan.
[00:47:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got time for this week. If you enjoyed it, head to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 4 6 8, and leave us a comment there.
If you'd like to subscribe, wpbuilds.com/subscribe.
And if you would like to make sure that the podcast has a future, wpbuilds.com/advertise.
Okay. Truly, that's it. I'm now gonna fade in some cheesy music. Wish you well. Say stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
