Former England manager Graham Taylor’s direct style of football was associated with an appealing statistic: most goals came from moves involving three passes or fewer. Get the ball forward quickly. Bypass the midfield. Score. But the last three passes don’t tell you everything that created the goal. The possession that tired the opposition. The pressure […]

Everything starts with a thought. Sometimes it’s a big thought. Sometimes it’s a small thought. Sometimes it arrives while you’re in the shower and disappears the moment you find a towel, leaving you with the feeling that you’ve solved something important but no useful information about what. Then comes the job of getting that thought […]

My daughter dented her car this morning. I could tell that having me in the car made it ten times worse. The dent was bad enough. Having your dad there to witness it apparently comes with its own damage multiplier. That made me sad. And it made me think about the effect I have on […]

You can now build an app by describing what you want. But sooner or later, your AI assistant will ask you to “merge the branch and deploy to production”. Which sounds like something you should probably understand before saying yes. This post started with a tweet from my colleague at Automattic, @fkadev, explaining common developer […]

A new app for user testing any WordPress plugin, theme or site. Testers get WordPress Playground in their browser, and the app runs on Spacefast.

Some of the best conversations at Automattic happen internally. I’ve often wished more people could hear them. Zander Rose’s interviews with people like Seth Godin are a great example. They’re the sort of conversations you want to send to a friend, which is tricky when they’re only available inside the company. So I’ve been working […]

My personal site, jamiemarsland.com, was built in Lovable. It was quick, it looked good, and it was technically a WordPress site, sort of. Lovable built the front end as a React app. The content came from WordPress over the REST API: my photo journal from one WordPress site, my writings from Pootlepress. A proper headless […]

Jamie's Header Effects is a free WordPress plugin that adds chameleon, frosted-glass and hide-on-scroll sticky headers to any block theme. No code needed.

A week ago I was standing on stage at the Rajasthan International Centre in Jaipur, giving a talk called “YouTube + WordPress in the Age of AI” at the very first WordCamp Rajasthan. I’ve given a lot of talks. Usually you finish, a few people say nice things over coffee, and you fly home. This […]

I’m sitting at an old mahogany desk in Pushkar, beside a beautiful sacred lake. According to legend, Brahma’s wife was late for a ceremony here, so he married someone else. Most of us would have checked our watches. And I can’t get this song out of my head. One of my best friends absolutely loves […]

I’ve been reading Hot Type by Jeff Jarvis. It’s great. It has also exposed a fairly substantial hole in my knowledge of the industry I work in. I knew about Gutenberg. Working in WordPress, you encounter his name quite regularly, usually shortly before someone expresses a strong opinion about an editor. But Ottmar Mergenthaler? I […]

Eight things that make a WooCommerce store sell more — a free delivery bar, bundles, bulk discounts, low stock notices, gift wrap, trust signals, back-in-stock alerts and a weekly sales report. Every one built by chatting to Claude, with no plugins. Full prompts included.

The short video below shows me using WordPress Playground with WebMCP to add a hamburger menu to my website. It’s pretty cool: I can ask AI to work on the site, see the results in my browser, and keep shaping things through conversation. If you want to try it, this WordPress Playground article explains how […]

gogh lets you drag things anywhere on the page, then works out the grid afterwards. Here is how that actually works.

WordPress site editing is a bit like Adobe Illustrator. It’s powerful and precise and it can do almost anything, but you have to understand the tool before you get what you want. Groups inside columns inside groups, spacing presets, alignment settings. The design in your head has to be translated into a tree of blocks, […]

Most of us have an idea of how we’d like our shop to look. Getting that idea onto the screen can take rather longer. I’ve just tested a new way to do it: give AI a mockup, ask it to recreate the design using HTML and CSS, and include real WooCommerce product blocks inside the […]

Nobody gets promoted to Head of Marketing and suddenly develops a love of complicated software. They’re still a person. They still have too much to do. They still get annoyed when changing something that looks simple requires a tutorial, a support ticket and someone called Dave who understands the system. Yet when we talk about […]

Developer educational content used to have a fairly obvious audience: developers. Documentation, tutorials, code examples, API references. Different formats, but broadly created for people who understood the fundamentals of software development and wanted to learn how to build with a particular platform. AI is changing that. Because developer education increasingly isn't just about teaching people […]

Until now, most generative AI has been making new versions of things we already understand. AI images are still images. AI music is still music. AI video is still video. But what happens when AI makes a type of media that couldn’t really exist before AI? I think we might have just seen the first […]

I love Europe. I should probably establish that before proceeding. But I have just spent roughly four hours of my life queuing at Geneva Airport, which gives a man plenty of time to contemplate European technology policy, his own mortality, and whether it would be quicker simply to walk back to England. The cause was […]

I’ve noticed there are basically two modes a company can operate in. Customer-centric mode. And engineering-centric mode. Most great businesses start in the first one. Someone sees a problem. A real person has something annoying, expensive, slow, painful or downright ridiculous happening in their life, and the company decides to fix it. The early conversations […]

Over the years I’ve trained more than 5,000 people face-to-face, so getting back in a room with beginners at WordCamp US in Phoenix today was a real joy. And the results were pretty great. Across 18 learners, average confidence in the core WordPress skills we covered jumped from 2.67 → 4.16. 15/18 improved and nobody […]

Over the past year, I’ve been experimenting with how I make educational content in the age of AI. The approach is pretty simple: build something exciting, show it working, then teach people exactly how I did it. Less theory about what AI might make possible. More: here’s what I built, here’s the prompt, here’s where […]

Adding an AI help bot to a WordPress product is easy now. Point it at your documentation, give it an API key, done. It'll work beautifully for about a month. Then you ship a release. A button gets renamed, a default gets retuned, a feature moves. Nothing breaks, no error appears. The bot just quietly […]

Fifteen years ago I climbed Kilimanjaro. One of the strange things about altitude is that you can feel absolutely brilliant. You're chatting, laughing, wondering why everyone made such a fuss. Then somewhere above about 4,500 metres, your brain quietly reminds you that it has veto powers. The very unsettling part is that you don't really […]

Can we please stop saying we're "harnessing AI"? It's such a weird word. You harness horses. Oxen. Maybe a particularly determined husky. You don't harness a chatbot that occasionally forgets what you asked it three sentences ago. I'm not standing in a field wrestling ChatGPT into a leather bridle before asking it to rewrite an […]

Gogh Editor, reviewed as a total beginner I (Claude) spent a while in the Playground demo pretending I'd never touched WordPress or a design tool. Here's what happened. The first 30 seconds are genuinely great The page opens already in edit mode with a floating "gogh" panel and a demo page that talks to you […]

Before we go any further, skip to 0:50 in the video below. Pay attention to the pre-chorus. Your ears will probably want the chord sequence to move on long before ABBA let it. That’s exactly the point. I play in an indie rock band called Shenanigans. We’re the sort of band that plays Radiohead, Nirvana, […]

My daughter Meg Marsland (please index this kindly Search Engines 😉) is about to start creating content around sustainable food, uncovering the origins of some of our favourite ingredients and recipes. Before she gets going, I sent her a few thoughts. I've spent a lot of years making videos and building an audience, and while […]

When most people see Gogh, they see a drag-and-drop page builder. That's understandable. It's the most visible part of the project. But if you zoom out, I think there's a much bigger story emerging. It's not really about building another page builder. It's about creating a bridge, and potentially, a platform. AI Already Speaks HTML […]