Building upon WordPress Core

Music

Jessica: Hey everyone, and welcome to another Greyd Conversations episode. This is episode number six already. My name is Jessica Lyschik, and today I’m joined by an amazing guest, which is Mike McAlister. Welcome!

Mike: Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be on here.

Jessica: Yeah, you are the creator of the Ollie theme. I think it’s one of the most loved and hyped block themes out there. And I have to say, it’s also one of my favorite block themes. Do you just want to give our viewers and listeners a quick introduction about you, the Ollie theme and maybe Ollie Pro and what are currently working on?

Mike: Yeah. I’ve been in WordPress a long time, and a large part of that has been building products for WordPress, usually around themes. So I had a few theme companies over the years and then, some plugins here and there, but mostly themes, because my background is in design. I love designing websites and website templates and kind of pushing those out to the masses, and WordPress themes are one of the best ways of doing that. It’s a massive distribution platform and so I love WordPress and WordPress themes for that reason. So I’ve been in WordPress a long time building products and now I’m working on Ollie. Ollie is a WordPress block theme. These are some of the new kinds of WordPress themes where you kind of build everything visually inside WordPress.

It’s kind of more of a no code first way of building. Everything you build in the editor can be customized and tweaked and you can change your content and colors and typography, all in the WordPress interface now, and the native WordPress interface. So yeah, we’ve been, my partner and I, Patrick, building Ollie for a few years now. It’s going well, I think on WordPress.org we have over 4,000 users using Ollie, which is a pretty big deal for a block theme. People are still learning them, figuring out how to build in this new paradigm. So we’re happy with how it’s going. And then we have Ollie Pro, which is an add.on to the Ollie block theme. By the way, the Ollie block theme is totally free.

You can go download it and use it and kind of start to get the feel of modern WordPress and how you build with these new tools. And Ollie Pro is kind of just more layouts, more patterns and some more advanced kind of tooling for that. So it just really helps you get from 0 to 100. You can build beautiful pages very quickly. You insert patterns, customize them, hit publish and get back to whatever you were doing. So, yeah, I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more about Ollie and Ollie Pro, but that’s me in a nutshell.

Jessica: Yeah. Great. Thanks. One thing that I think is really important, because block themes are fundamentally different, than classic themes used to be. So there’s much more that is provided by WordPress core itself. And, I think one interesting thing is that, both Ollie and also the Greyd products are in their user experience, close to core. So they’re not like building something artificial on top of WordPress, but instead they’re trying to embrace the native WordPress and just adding functionality and design to what’s possible, but also enhancing it whenever there’s a good fit that there should be more than core actually provides at the moment.

Mike: Yeah. I love that approach. You know, even my old WordPress theme companies, they were themes that were just very close to core, I didn’t do the page builder stuff. I didn’t add in a ton of stuff. They were just very clean, just kind of core WordPress themes, in a way. And there’s just so many benefits to that.

One, you don’t have the dependencies of third-party plugins, which I’m not here to down talk third party plugins. There’s a use case for them. But I think for me being able to get rid of that dependency and instead figure out how to build on WordPress core, makes my products more, you know, long-term friendly, kind of more bulletproof in a way. And they can appeal to a wider audience, because every single person who installs WordPress today is met with the page builder that I’ve chosen to build on, and that’s native WordPress. So by default you get the site editor building experience, the block editor, and all of that. You get that right out of the box, though, which is incredible. We have that.

Jessica: Yeah, that’s, really cool. Because like this you can do so much more without having to add a third-party plugin to it. I mean, there are many great out there that really empower users. Even before the block editor and site editor were around. So, I think, there’s just a great variety of things like how you can create websites. But I think another benefit could be like performance. So you’re not, like, hiding behind tons and tons of JavaScript or extra CSS files, but instead just providing the absolute necessary, which may be in a block theme only a few extra lines of CSS, because the majority of it is actually already provided by core.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I hear all the time from people in the Ollie support how much faster their sites are and they’re not using caching or anything like that, because like as Jessica mentioned, you know, the beauty of modern WordPress is that it’s all handled at the core level. And so the styles that you’re applying to your site, the colors and kind of the CSS that’s output by some of these blocks is all performant by default. It only loads when that block loads. And fonts only load when they’re needed and things like that all just automatically works out of the box. And so the default experience is just so much more performant.

And then block themes themselves are super light because they’re just design layers. And so they’re not really adding a ton of bulk to your site unless you have a bunch of functions and stuff in there. But, themes like Ollie don’t do that. We’re just a design layer and we lean heavily on WordPress, because that’s where all the tooling is. The power is all there. So, yeah, there’s performance and there’s so many benefits to to leaning into native WordPress.

Jessica: Yeah. That’s true. I have a question: What do you think are the best practices in creating a close to core experience just from what you have experience with creating Ollie.

Mike: I think what helps is understanding WordPress itself deeply. Like if you understand the ethos of WordPress and you understand kind of how to craft a WordPress experience, and that means even if you’re doing something more advanced or if you want to do something extra in WordPress, trying to dial it in, so it feels like WordPress.

Like, for example, we have, you know, we’re redoing our onboarding wizard. And when we first released it, people were really excited about it, because it’s like new. It looks like the WordPress site editor. It feels like WordPress. And so a lot of people were like, why don’t you just put this on WordPress? And it’s like, I wish it were that easy. But it’s not. But I think the benefit of us building it like that was that it felt like WordPress. It felt native. It felt kind of like an obvious experience. And it lets the user stay in the WordPress context.

Because one of the things that kind of bugs me about WordPress – and I know this is a benefit of it – but like, you could build whatever you want, however you want in WordPress. That means you can build a plugin, you can build its own interface, and you could put all your branding in there, and you could put all these graphics in there. And lots of plugins do that. And it creates, unfortunately, a fractured experience for the user. They get WordPress, then they have this plugin that looks like this, this plugin looks like this. And all of a sudden it starts to look kind of like this Frankenstein thing.

And it creates kind of a mess in my opinion. I would love for us to get back to a unified WordPress experience that lets plugins build native experiences that are powerful and extensible and all these things, but it feels like the same experience. And so I think if you can kind of dig into WordPress, if you’re building an app, use the core components. Follow the kind of naming conventions, use the icon set that’s in there, use the tools that are available to build your thing. And then it feels like WordPress, and then we’re not reinventing the wheel. We don’t have to have a thousand different setting pages. We can have a more unified experience. So I think there’s a lot to it. But I think following WordPress as lead and trying to stay close to that. Ultimately, I think it’s a better experience for the end user.

Jessica: Yeah. That’s a pretty good conclusion on this. You just mentioned the onboarding experience. Do you want to share maybe, how this looks like in Ollie?

Mike: Well, I can show you the updated, the upcoming one, if you’d like to see that? It’s not entirely finished. It’s still in a busted state, because I’m in my development environment which is totally crazy. Let’s just do it live and I’ll show you what’s coming, and we’ll go from there. So if you just give me one second here, I’ll switch over to it.

Jessica: I’m especially curious about the onboarding thing, because I’ve been involved in this discussion that used to be there in the WordPress Slack about, how can we make an onboarding experience. So I’m just very curious to see what you’ve been up to.

Mike: Yeah. Let me just share this whole window here. Okay. All right. Can you see my screen? Yep. All right, so, as I mentioned with Ollie, what we did was, we built a… Effectively, this is kind of like our own dashboard in the Ollie Pro plugin. And as you can see, it looks like the site editor. It’s designed to look like the site editor. Unfortunately, it’s not built right into the site editor, because it’s just not that extensible yet. Hopefully one day. So we built it and just kind of mimicked what it would look like in the site editor. And again, trying to keep a cohesive experience for the user. So, in our dashboard, we have a way for users to log in to the Ollie Pro plugin.

We have video tutorials, we have some docs in here, but we also have the theme setup wizard. And the idea here is to help users get past that first hour, two hours setting up their site, jumping around. We all know the WordPress experience kind of has you jumping from screen to screen to screen and it’s just not a fluid setup process. And so the idea was, I’ve been dealing with the frustration of onboarding for so long. Many users have. And WordPress is finally at the point where we could do some of this, in a unified wizard. So we decided to do with Ollie.

So the first version of this wizard looked a lot different than this. And like I said, this is kind of busted, but we’re just going to where we’re going to go with it. But the idea is, how do we help the user get from zero to creating pages, setting the color palette and working on their website and leave all of that other stuff behind. So in our setup wizard, you’ll get started and you’ll be able to choose a few options. Right from the start, you’ll be able to just start a fresh set up and kind of go through and choose all the settings yourself. You’ll be able to set up a site based on one of our pattern collections.

They’re almost like themes in a way, and they’re designed in a specific way. So we have several pages that look the same, have the same esthetic, same style, same typography, and you’ll be able to quickly just create all the pages from there. Or we’ll have an option where, if you’d run through the set-up before, and you can save it at the end, and then you could just load that and click one button and it’ll just set it up how you had that set-up before. This might be helpful if you’re an agency or a freelancer, if you’re setting up a site the same way for clients to get started, you just load your configuration and then get going.

Your next step is just installing some essential plugins here. The icon block by Nick Diego. Big block visibility. These are almost like standards when you’re working with block themes. They’re just totally necessary. And then the advanced query loop is another great one that just builds on the query loop. It lets you do some more powerful querying and you can set different parameters to create more advanced loops if you’re creating like a magazine site or something like that. It’s kind of critical. And then once we have those plugins installed, we can move on to creating pages.

Again, this kind of looks busted, but the idea will be that these are patterns, full page patterns from the Ollie theme, that are currently in the theme. But we’re also going to load patterns from our Pro collection, so you’ll be able to select dozens and dozens of different pages and create different pages. So you could select them. And, we’ll just automatically create these pages, apply the patterns, apply a template for you, and we’ll do that on the fly. Okay. So here’s where the wizard starts to get cool. And this is where it’s done.

You can see, we’re loading a cool preview over here. The other pages didn’t quite have this yet, but this setting in particular, you know, setting up your home page in the settings reading page where you have to choose your blog and your home page, a confusing thing that users have a hard time finding. They have a hard time understanding. So we’ve just built an interface to help them do that in the wizard. So without guessing, you can just see the page that you’re setting is your home page. You can choose a different one.

You can come down here, select which blog page you want to be your blog. If you don’t have a blog page yet, we just have a button. You can create a blog page real quickly and we’ll use that one instead. So again, we’ve kind of cut out that stuff. We’ve just made this a one minute thing. They choose their pages, they click save and continue. Next we can start working on our color palette. We can come down here and choose one of the pre-existing color palettes. This isn’t quite working over here, but the idea is that the preview will update and you’ll be able to see your color palette applied.

Or if you want to generate your own color palette, you can come down here and pick your brand color and we’ll just create a brand palette based on that and you’ll be able to apply that. Again, you could do all this in WordPress. But you’ll be jumping around and you have to find the site editor, and then you have to find the global styles panel, and you have to do just so many things to get there.

Jessica: That’s true.

Mike: Yeah. So now it’s all like in one guided experience where you can just step by step go through and do all the initial configuration without, as I said, jumping around the entire backend to figure out where the stuff is. Because the reading settings, like the home page and blog, they used to be outside of the site editor. Now they’re by core also trying to get in there. But again, you would still need to jump in the site editor itself to actually find these settings and not have them like in this really nice way of like, okay, this is what all the steps you need to do to have WordPress and your blog theme configured to just work essentially. That’s right. Yeah. And like I said, there’s a certain point in WordPress’ history where some of this wasn’t possible to do this from a custom… This is a REACT app basically. But now it is.

And I wish it was still a little more extensible, but we’re able to do the things we need to do. And similarly with typography: We’re just going to pull typography from our theme json and let them swap it here. And similarly we can change the page layouts here. They can choose. You can see the preview here. It’s got a wide one. We have previewing a left sidebar. And this is a full page preview of the actual site so you can see exactly how it looks. And similarly with the blog post, we can preview a blog post, and this is an actual post that’s on the site.

Jessica: So this is basically the page and the single templates and then you just choose what kind of basic layout you want to have there?

Mike: Yep, yep. You’re choosing like what do you want your page layout to look like? What do you want your single blog to look like? And then what do you want your blog layout to be? Do you want it to be a list style like this? Do you want to use a grid style like this? And yeah. And then finally just letting them choose their header and footer designs. So being able to choose, oh, this is a cool header here. I want one with a banner up top. And some things, I can choose a light or dark version of it. Similar with the footer. We can just choose.

Maybe I want this centered one. I want the dark footer instead. And that will go and change this in the site editor, so that when you go to edit your site, it all just is exactly like you set it up. And I don’t think this finished step is finished yet, but yeah. And so imagine going through the set up and then saving that configuration, and then you can just load it again later if you want, to very quickly set up your site in the first step. So that’s it. Yeah. It looks a little funky, but we’re pretty close to start beta testing it as soon as we finish up these final steps. And I think it’s going to be exciting.

I’m excited to see what people think of it. And, it’s also helpful to show people what you can build with this these days. I think some people are kind of afraid to build in WordPress, or they just think it’s, you know, we just go and get the block editor. Now you can build full page JavaScript applications and do all kinds of tweaking of WordPress settings and styles. Programmatically, you can do it all, with code. So, yeah, I’m excited to show people that and see what they think of it.

Jessica: Yeah, I think it’s really great. And even if it’s not complete yet, that already gave a very good example of, you know, how easy it can be to set up a block theme in just a few simple steps and just get it running. I really, really like that. Cool. I’m really excited. It looks really great.

Mike: That’s awesome. I’m also just hoping it gets people thinking about WordPress a little differently. And not just in terms of block themes, but, you know, we have, 50,000 plugins in WordPress, something like that. And many of them, 98% of them, are still for old WordPress. They have not updated the interfaces. They’ve not thought about, what can I do to kind of make this a visual experience or a more immersive experience, or created blocks for their plugins yet. And they’re missing out because tying into this new WordPress experience, it just makes the experience for the user so much better.

And it gives us an opportunity to refresh our products, create new pricing tiers, sell more plugins, create better experiences. But it takes a lot of work. You got to learn some JavaScript. You have to learn how to get in there. But if you don’t know, get some AI to help you with it. I mean, everyone’s doing it. So just get some AI and you’ll be in there in no time.

Jessica: Yeah. That’s true. One question I have is like, what are the challenges in building something like this wizard or in general? I’m thinking of, it looked very similar to the site editor itself. What I can see, and what we also see at Greyd is, that people sometimes confuse what is core and what is the additional product. Because it’s so seamlessly integrated that people actually do have some trouble sometimes to pinpoint, is this a core issue or is this a product issue?

Mike: Yeah, the challenges were definitely WordPress itself. And that, you know, block themes and WordPress themes in general, historically they don’t get a lot of love. They kind of are treated as just silly templates, almost disposable commodities. You know, compare the WordPress.org plugin pages to the WordPress.org theme pages. It’s just like you get a tiny paragraph to tell what your theme is. And, I think that kind of shows as well in what kind of underlying code and API’s there are to work with block themes because, for example, programmatically changing the typography and the theme or the color palettes, that is difficult to do.

You’re effectively filtering the theme json file and changing things on the fly. And it kind of works, but it’s just like if there was some energy put into that, it could be a lot easier and it could give people a lot more options to what they’re doing with this kind of stuff, with an app like we’re building. So, the limitations we always faced with Ollie and Ollie Pro are usually just WordPress, where WordPress is. That users want responsive controls. They don’t have those in WordPress. They want hover colors. We don’t have that in WordPress. So they have trouble figuring out where their header is. That’s not an Ollie problem.

That’s a WordPress problem. So the limitations we usually face are just inherent with where WordPress is. That’s the kind of the the gift and the curse of building on the bleeding edge is that one. The gift is that you can build a product that is forward leaning and kind of built for the future. And you can get a crowd of people using it, early adopters, and you can be first to market and you can get a nice kind of a good amount of momentum. But the downside is that you’re always limited by the wall of where progress is.

And so, if this is the wall of WordPress, Ollie is just always right here following it. You know, and we try to help push the wall by saying we’re building a product in the space. Here’s what we’re learning. Here’s the pain points, here’s this, this, this. But WordPress moves at WordPress’s speed. They’re going to release the features when they are ready. They don’t care if I need them per se. They don’t listen to me in that way. And that’s fine. But the limitations of WordPress are where we’re always at with Ollie.

And to be fair though, at the same time we’re able to build some incredible stuff. I mean, the fact that we’ve built Ollie Pro and built all these cool features in this onboarding wizard, and it is as good as it is, is amazing. So no complaints. It’s going to be a really cool experience. And we wouldn’t be able to do that if we didn’t have the APIs and the endpoints and the technology we have. So I’m grateful for it.

Jessica: Yeah, I can just share that we have a very similar experience at Greyd, like often running into worlds where the core is just not being able to provide what we need, in that part. And something we want to change there is, we want to get more into core contributions, especially in that extensibility part. And, yeah, I would be super happy if you can share maybe some things in the future with us, so we can maybe bring it to WordPress core and then we both benefit. Yeah, Ollie benefits from it and we at Greyd will benefit from it as well as any other products will benefit from it as well.

Mike: Yeah. That’s great. I really appreciate the work that you’re doing with core and Greyd kind of helping you pull that off. Because as much as I try to get in, the most I’m doing now is just participating in GitHub tickets between building Ollie and building a small child and everything else. Like, I only have time to really get in there and just help with feedback shaping, basically. I’ll have more time coming up and I’ll be able to get in there and provide more detailed feedback and maybe even some commits and some design feedback and stuff. But right now, it’s tough to do all of that.

So I’m very appreciative of the work that you and other people are doing to kind of get in there and make some really excellent change in WordPress, especially around block themes, but just in general, like design, tooling, making sure that design tools are consistent, that you have a color option on here and you have the color option on here. You know, so it’s a tough job, but we’re moving in the right direction, because people like you are making it happen.

Jessica: Thank you. Yeah, we are getting there. But it’s still a long way to go. But I think we’re making progress on this. Especially the, I’ve been following the recent updates in the Gutenberg plugin, and there’s a lot of, like, what you said. I think colors is mostly set now, but borders has been caught up now in the past few Gutenberg releases. So, yeah, that is definitely something that I pointed out also quite some time ago. It’s like, why do we have all these design tools, but they’re only available at like three core blocks? Why do you have these at so many others? And I think this is just these tiny little things that kind of make or break the entire user experience, essentially.

Mike: Absolutely. It happens so often where, you know, part of my job is of running Ollie and having a product in the space is education. I have to be somebody who is knowledgeable enough to teach people how to do this stuff, because I’m building a product in a new space. And so I’m always having to, either in Ollie support or just X and stuff, I make videos to help people learn this stuff. But, you know, I’ll go to teach somebody something and I’m like, oh, I’ll just add this thing here.

And then it turns out that setting is not actually available yet. And then I have to explain it to people. Like the amount of times I’ve had to explain why we don’t have hover colors on buttons and things like that. And unfortunately, it just makes us look like almost unprofessional. Yeah, we understand it’s hard to get the stuff over the line, but to an average user who could go to Wix or any other website builder and get hover colors on buttons to them, it seems like WordPress isn’t serious.

That’s what they think. They think, what are they doing? They don’t have button hover colors. What? Why not? There’s no logical answer to them why we don’t. You could even expand that out to the responsive controls. Again, we understand it’s a difficult thing, but to an average user who comes in we say, no, you can’t change that on mobile. Whatever it is. And there’s no excuse to them why they can’t, because they’ll just go somewhere else. And so you’re absolutely right. These little things, they all add up to an experience that is, for people who are not diehard WordPress users, it’s a fragmented experience.

And it’s not a good one. It doesn’t feel good to be constantly interrupted while you’re building your website with little things poking you, saying, you can’t do that, you can’t do that, you can’t do that, you can’t do that. It just doesn’t feel good and it doesn’t give I don’t think users the confidence that they should be building here. So again, I always try to be careful when I’m sharing my experiences about this stuff, because I don’t want to come across as like complaining and like, oh, we can’t do this. I’m just kind of trying to elevate the stuff that people, real users are telling me.

Not just DIYers, but agencies and stuff. They want to use this stuff. They want to lean into it as well, but they can’t as long as we have these little holes here and there. And so, you know, as much as I love some of these big features that are coming, I would love to see us focus on that baseline experience, building an average website experience and make sure that everyone of those holes is filled before we’re kind of talking big picture, massive new features or APIs or whatever else. Because we’re almost there. It’s just a lot of little holes in my opinion.

Jessica: Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. And I think even these small things like hover and, like what users said, these can be dealbreakers for people. Oh yeah. This this doesn’t work in WordPress? Okay, I’m out. So, I think this is something that should be more considered into like, okay, can we focus more on this right now?

Mike: Because, yeah, it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it it is a big deal for people. It’s huge. You could think of these things as marketing. Right? We think of it just as tools and developer tools, but it’s marketing. And if you can’t say that we can change colors on hover and everything else, that just looks bad. But if we can say no, you can build your website here and you could do all the things that you want to do. That’s great marketing, because you go to these, you know, Framer and Webflow. What do they show you on their home pages?

They show you these beautiful websites and they show animations where things are changing colors. And we don’t have that. So, it would be incredible marketing for us to be able to say, you can build any website you want here. Now, some people in WordPress do say that you can build anything you want here, but they don’t talk about the little asterisk that says you might need to write CSS or whatever else. That’s not a great experience. So again, if we’re going to have a visual page builder, then we’re going to have a visual page builder. Let’s do it right. Let’s do it to completion.

And let’s make sure that users can build the kind of modern websites that aren’t just blogs. We got to stop thinking about WordPress as a blog. It’s not a blog anymore. People don’t use it like that. People have the website and then their blog. Their blog is this big, their website is this big. And so if we think about WordPress like that, it changes the shape of what you’re building in terms of the platform. We have a website builder and blog stuff. So, I would like to see everyone’s focus kind of move to that direction. And I think it could make some pretty big changes.

Jessica: Yeah. Amen to that. Absolutely. It’s what, I personally see exactly the same. This was also my intention to, like, have a little side quest. This was also my intention for 2024, for the default theme. Like showcase more that WordPress is so much more than just a blog. Yeah. In a day to day agency life you do not just build blogs, you build entire websites.

Mike: That’s right. I think the majority of WordPress websites are no longer blogs. Maybe they are or it’s 50:50, I don’t know, but a good chunk of WordPress websites just is a website itself. Yeah, not a blog.

Jessica: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know the numbers either. I don’t know what the breakdown is, but I just can’t imagine that the majority of people are going to build just a blog. Because blogging is changing now, too, with AI and everything else.

Mike: And social media. So blogs are great, but they are secondary in my opinion. And I love what people like Brian Cordes and others are saying to kind of help illustrate this idea about looking at it from a page first perspective instead of post first perspective. And I think it, again, it’s just a mindset shift. WordPress has been the same way for a long time. And if you look at a lot of the block themes that are coming out, there are a lot less blogging and more like marketing sites.

And I think that says a lot, too. I think those are the kind of sites people are building. But our platform itself still feels like you’re entering into a blog workflow, and then you’re building your website through this blog workflow. You know what I mean?

Jessica: Yeah, sure.

Mike: Instead of it being like, it’s a website platform and then you build your blog here and all your other pages here. So again, it’s perspective like someone else, Matt Mullenweg might look at it and say, no, it’s a website builder. But, I don’t know. I think the way we communicate WordPress, and if you look at WordPress.org, it just feels more like this is still a blogging platform. But I don’t know.

Jessica: Yeah, maybe that’s where products like Greyd can come in, because we have these many features that are missing. We have hover styles and additional stuff like animations and responsive controls and all that stuff like that. So, I think this is more going into the direction what you are suggesting, but I totally agree. Maybe we should focus in core more in this direction and less and like, hey, it’s a blog. But let’s put that aside. I think with Greyd adding some of these features, I think it’s also a really cool thing, because, as I said earlier, Greyd and Ollie, they are both close to core and have this same mindset of how can a product be. And the cool thing is, you can even combine both. You can pick the Greyd plugin and the Ollie theme, also Ollie Pro in addition, and just combine these two cool tools, and then boom, have an amazing website. Yeah. That’s awesome.

Mike: Yeah, I love the combination of those two.

Jessica: Yeah. So, we have prepared, a little demo site. Just let me quickly share this. So, here we go. I think you should see my window now.

Mike: Yep. I can see it.

Jessica: Okay. Cool. Right. I need to rearrange stuff. All right, here we go. So, this is all a little demo page just to quickly show what we just discussed about, like, what is core lacking? What is Ollie providing and, thinking of what you just “criticized” about core. Yeah. Just bringing this pieces together with Greyd, I think this is a really cool point here now in our conversation to share. So, as I scroll down, you can see there’s animations going on. So this is the Ollie theme with patterns from the Ollie theme, plus some fancy stuff going on that we can create with Greyd.

Mike: That’s really cool.

Jessica: Ooops, I mean, we all have some things that are not perfectly aligned.

Mike: Oh, yeah, I mean, I just showed a demo that was barely working. So you’re doing fine.

Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, we can just maybe quickly hop into the site editor. To just get a feeling for it. It’s actually nothing super special or anything else rather than just these two products together. So, there we go. I think these boxes had some animations going on. So as you can see here. This is also basically what we have embedded into the site editor itself with no super fancy additional extras here and there. It’s just a columns block. And then we just add the animations on top and then they just scroll up, or show up as you scroll this way. And yeah. It’s just basically the patterns from the Ollie theme and combined with this.

Mike: I love that. I think it’s really cool to show how the future of WordPress probably is like these two products are doing. They’re just building layers on top of the you know, the 85% of WordPress that is there. And that is great. And we’re just building small layers to help get us to where we want to go.

Jessica: Yeah, that’s true. All right. So, we now discussed a few things about the product itself, like WordPress core, combining both products, Greyd and Ollie, to use together to create cool websites. One interesting thing I would like to talk about is the pattern approach that we have with block themes. So, with like traditional themes, you had like these regular templates, that you just would design in the template files. But with block themes, what you mostly use are patterns. And this also changes the entire mindset of how you create a website essentially.

Mike: Oh yeah.

Jessica: And block themes, as I said, I think you mentioned this earlier, they are just like a layer, because we just have the configuration file, the theme json file, and then basically just the patterns as like, here’s like how the design looks like. Do you have any thoughts like, what do you think maybe is an official for the users like this different approach instead of like, hey, write an entire HTML page from top to bottom in my templates, like we used to do in classic themes.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, it’s certainly a different approach, and I think it’s something people have to kind of get used to and you have to build with for a while to kind of understand how to use them best. But in my opinion, it is a better and cleaner and faster way of building. And so, yeah, like Jessica was saying, if you think of your WordPress, your block theme is just a layer of styles, right? And then you have a pattern that comes through and when it hits your site, it takes on all of the styles of your site, of your theme json file.

And what you get is patterns take on all those styles and then, yeah, you can keep adding patterns and patterns and patterns to your site and they’ll automatically take on the styles of your site. So with Ollie and Ollie Pro, we have a ton of patterns. I don’t even know how many, a ton of them. Some of them are just page sections and some of them are full page layouts. And then we have several different styles in the Ollie theme. And so you can choose a style and then apply all those patterns to it. And what you kind of get is like a bunch of themes in one, because your styles can change the way your site looks pretty drastically depending on the typography and colors that you have in there.

And so I think for most people, it’s funny. Because coming from classic WordPress, I think a lot of us were like, well, this pattern thing is kind of hard to understand. And, you know, it’s tough. But I think it’s almost easier for people coming from outside of WordPress to understand, because I think a lot of other platforms do this, these pre-designed sections, whether they’re called patterns or whatever, that just like template sections or whatever. And the benefit is, you can build your site, like I said, with sections, you can just put together a bunch of different sections, or you can use full page layouts.

And then on top of that, you can use things like synced patterns where you’re kind of almost turning it into a component. So you can change your design site-wide, or you can change just parts of your patterns while keeping the full design intact. So yeah, it’s something new and something different and takes a little while to play with. But ultimately you get a better website experience in my opinion. Easier to customize, easier to add new sections, it’s easier to go in and delete things. Instead of going into the code every time. It just enables a different level of user to get in there and build with patterns. And it’s intuitive in a way. You know, people know there’s a website header and a hero section, so they can search for one of those and put it in there.

They need services boxes. They can search for that and put that in there and so on and on. So again, it’s something that is new. People are still learning it, but I prefer it myself. I think it’s really cool.

Jessica: Yeah. I think it maybe has a little bit of a learning curve to get used to this new system. But I think having worked with it already so far, I like it much more than previous systems I worked on. Even if they were on WordPress, the front page builders or, different themes that had their own options, then you had to use Tiny MCE or whatever, and you can just do so much more. And it’s more of a mix and match. And I think one thing that is really interesting is, I’ve experienced this with Notion, this knowledge management tool or whatever you want to call it.

Mike: Yeah.

Jessica: It’s fairly similar in these concepts. When you get started on a blank Notion page, like you don’t know what to do, you just, okay, maybe experiment here and there. And what is helpful to understand the product there, is like to use templates that are made by other people. So you just pull them in and then you start playing around with it. And I think we should embrace this mindset more alongside with block themes, because it’s essentially the same. People are afraid when they open up the block editor and see just this mostly white blank space and then they have to fit in. Okay, what do I do?

Do I add a headline, a paragraph or an image or whatever? And going from absolutely zero to okay, this is a very cool layout, I think patterns and templates, or full page layouts, whatever you want to call them, just kind of help tremendously in getting started and like, okay, this is how this layout works. If you have overlapping stuff or anything like that.

Mike: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And to your point, that’s another reason why we really wanted to redo our site wizard, is because I think almost universally, once people get past the hump of the blank screen and they get their site set-up and all this other stuff. Once they’re on the page editing and then changing text and colors, I think people like that part. I don’t think there’s a lot of complaint from WordPress users about that part. Once they’re in there and they have something on their page, I think that is exciting to them. I think it’s empowering. They feel like, wow, I’m changing my content and I’m publishing my own website.

But they don’t want to deal with setting up their site from scratch, because let’s be honest, it sucks. It’s not fun, it’s tedious. It’s jumping around a bunch of different screens. And people want to get in there and do the fun stuff. That’s the best part about building websites. It’s doing the fun stuff, not the hard and tedious stuff. And there’s so many barriers before you get to that point. And so, if we can kind of get rid of those and help people get to the design point, I think that helps them understand the pattern thing better and helps them get more excited about it.

Because I tell people, not just people using patterns, but like, if you want to learn FSE and you want to start building websites, you almost have to build like 2 or 3 websites in it front to back. You have to just go through the pain of doing it to learn it. And then once you do, you kind of have AHA moment where you’re like, oh, okay, I get it. When you’ve forgotten how you used to do things in WordPress and you approach it with a no code first mindset and kind of leaning on patterns and leaning on the styles and the global styles and being able to change things at that level.

When you get those things around your head, it changes how you build and you all of a sudden are building more efficiently, quicker, lighter websites, easier to maintain. It just takes a little while to do it. And I think a lot of people, they kind of don’t go through that phase, because the learning curve maybe is a little too much and they give up right away. But I do think on the other side of that learning curve is a new WordPress that people have not quite experienced properly yet. And again, it’s kind of our fault. And on WordPress, to make sure that users get past that hurdle.

And some of that includes the things we talked about. Getting rid of those little annoyances and adding button hover colors and things like that. All these things are little hurdles, and if the user doesn’t get past those, they don’t get to that unified experience on the other side. And so, yeah, I don’t know where I was going with that other than to say there’s a learning curve. But on the other side of it is a whole new way of building websites. And I think a lot of people would like it, if they could get there.

Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. Just as a little reminder, in the last Greyd Conversations episode, we exactly talked about that. Or my colleague Sandra and Rosanne van Staalduinen, a Dutch agency owner. They discussed exactly that process, because she tried to get into full side editing and worked with Greyd. She essentially decided at the end that’s not for her, which is absolutely cool. Because, if you haven’t done it, you can just complain about it. And maybe it’s like, okay, maybe this sucks because you have no hover styles. But if you have done it, you can say, okay, either this is something that I’m okay with dealing and I want to progress forward. And I see like this is beneficial for a future. Or you can say, this is not really what I want to do, and you just then call it quits and try it maybe in the future again. But for now, decide to go somewhere else.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. If you’ve gone through it and you see everyone’s going to have their own priorities and what they need. Agencies, freelancers, they all have different things they need. And it’s just going to be the reality, that it doesn’t work for some people. A lot of people, it’s a little way. But I think what we have now is a great foundation. And if we can keep solving those little problems, we get to the point where that’s not part of the conversation.

The the button hovers are not part of the conversation, because we’ve solved. That responsive tools, no one cares about that, because we already have it. So if we can get rid of those things, I think people will start forgiving some of the other things. You know what I mean?

Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So, as a wrap up, because, we are close to the finish line here. I would like to ask your opinion about, what do you see as the future development of the block and site editor? Like where will it go? Where should it go? What is your wish, maybe? And what are your thoughts about the entire ecosystem? Like existing page builders alongside, now with the block and site editor growing steadily?

Mike: Yeah, I’ll answer that part first because I think, since we have this awesome page builder in WordPress now that can build the baseline website, and again, hopefully it keeps getting better. I think other page builders are going to have to figure out what niche they want to dial in on, because just like your average page builder, building an average site kind of thing, if WordPress is doing that – even if it’s doing it not as well as them – that’s going to take away from those page builders. Like I said, the earlier the the default experience in WordPress.

Now, if you install WordPress today, you have a page builder, at your fingertips. And so you may never go looking for Elementor or these other things, because you kind of have one there. Now, that’s not to say that all these other page builders don’t bring a ton of people to WordPress. They do. A lot of people still use WordPress because they found it through Elementor and other things like that, but I think they’re going to have to figure out what’s the unique thing about our product that can exist in WordPress and doesn’t necessarily have to compete with the site editor part of it.

And, I think we’ll see a lot less page builder plugins and hopefully more things like Greyd, where you’re building a specific layer for a specific thing, you’re adding value without adding bulk and or we’re taking the, you know, 85, 90% of WordPress that is great. And we’re just adding to it or fixing the things we think we can make better. And going from there. So, yeah, I think that will happen there.

And then in terms of like my wish for WordPress is like really radically focusing on the details of this user experience. I am not really interested about things like collaboration. I think that’s going to be cool. But in terms of the reality that I live every day and the things that I hear from customers is, my wish is to just really focus on that baseline experience. We got to get the design tooling to the point where people aren’t complaining about it. As much as I love the intrinsic design thing in terms of responsiveness, it’s just not enough for practical websites.

If you’re talking about simple blog sites, maybe. But people need that level of granularity and they’re asking for it in droves. We have to do it. WordPress has said they’re going to do it. And so I do believe that. But with things slowing down in core, it’s hard to tell if that comes this year. And then how long do we wait for things like that? So again, I would like to just see radical focus on the small details of WordPress. The site editor is good. It’s a great place. The thing itself is very powerful. And all of the little bits around it are very powerful. But dialing in that experience and making it unimpeachable good, I think, is where I would put my efforts right now.

Jessica: Yeah, that’s great thoughts there. Okay. So we are close to the end. Thank you so much, Mike, for taking the time for this awesome conversation. Yeah, I’m super excited about Ollie. And everyone listening, Thank you so much for hanging around and see you in the next episode.

Mike: Thanks. See you later.

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