Modern WordPress Theme Development with WP Rig ft. Rob Ruiz

I mean, I'm pretty excited about where things are going with WordPress.

I think it's a crazy time in web development, probably the craziest time in the last 15, 20 years that we've been working on it.

There's so many things up in the air.

I generally feel like There's a lot of places where WordPress, where you say like, yeah, maybe you don't need a CMS and a, you know, server and a database somewhere.

And I think there's a lot of cases where it still is extremely valuable.

And I think that the more we lean in on those valuable places, then I think WordPress gets a little bit more like resilient, even if like we're saying goodbye to a bunch of spam blogs or, you know, static marketing sites or that sort of stuff.

But I'm kind of curious, like maybe as a closing question, when you look at WordPress and some of the stuff that's been coming out of it and where it's headed, do you have like a thing in your mind that's like, when I think about agency workflows and I think about these developer experience workflows, this is like, this is, it's hard to say just one, but like.

The gap that WordPress really should solve, the thing that's like the missing piece or the thing that just hasn't been pushed over the edge that would make WordPress a much easier default for these types of situations.

Where does your head go with like, this is the thing that we really need to focus on in the core software?

yeah ironically there's a content management problem in our content management system in my opinion and these are like hyper specific opinions and one might argue this means like creating your own content management system to solve it but things like storing all the content in one giant blob called post content in the database with a whole bunch of html comments in there i think is proving to be quite challenging, especially for agentic development.

If you want your agent to build you a whole bunch of template content or whatever, like, hey, design me a layout for this homepage, and I don't care what it is, just fill it with placeholder content so I can test my theme to make sure it... you know, fits all these different content scenarios, make sure it's, you know, when you throw certain blocks in there, the blocks are being treated properly or whatever, right? Like they're, it's very difficult to automatically generate content.

And I think a big reason is because of how we're managing the content in at the database level, I think is I think it's a bit outdated.

It worked at some point and it's certainly backwards compatible.

So that's like nice that we're thinking about backwards compatibility, but it's also, in my opinion, not very forwards or future compatible.

And so I look at things like MongoDB and I'm like, well, you know, a NoSQL database would handle complex content structures quite nicely.

And being able to define your content in JSON instead of, you know, raw HTML, and then have that JSON be read and converted to HTML at some point would probably be really cool.

And there'd be a lot of advantages to doing that type of thing.

Not just like better agentic content generation, but also like taking content from one place and moving it somewhere else or i think there's a big problem with like if you've added some block or some content to like 50 pages or whatever like how do you if you want to slightly tweak that or refactor it but you want it to be refactored in 50 different places how do you do that and so like i think it would be a lot easier to do that if all the content was json as opposed to a giant string of of html i think that's I think a lot of people are trying to solve the symptom and not necessarily solve the root underlying problem.

And I know that's like a huge paradigm change, but that's just something I've been thinking about for like quite a long time is like, man, it would be nice if this content was stored as Jason and not, not HTML markup.

So, so that's one thing.

And then there's, I have opinions about like the plugin management page.

now that like everything is block based people end up installing 5 10 15 20 different plugins just for blocks now when you look at your plugin page like half of the plugins you're looking at are all block plugins and you're like oh man this is like getting very cluttered and ugly and messy even though it's not like from a performance standpoint know it's not necessarily a big deal because they're just block plugins they're not gonna like slow my website down or anything but it it's kind of a cluttered mess and and i've actually built a plugin to to fix that problem it's not public it's private but yeah if anybody wants a cool plugin that fixes that problem hit me up and i'm happy to share it but yeah uh there's that problem and then like the media manager i think like that's an you've got two kinds of content right media content and text content and so like i think the media situation also needs to be addressed as well and so i think if we can start As a content management system, I think if we can start solving some of the content management problems, not just from the admin experience situation, which I think the block editor is fantastic and it scratches that itch for that specific situation very well.

I think there's architectural, fundamental architectural challenges that if we address them like other problems would get solved by default, I think.

Yeah.

I mean, I have a lot of thoughts on all of that.