Our New AI Website Builder

A very important distinction indeed. Wordpress.COM is not the same as the self-hosted version at WordPress.ORG

While they've made recent changes to .COM to bring it closer to .ORG mostly as a knee-jerk response to the Matt v WPE scrap, they are still very different experiences.

I rarely advise clients looking to DIY solution to go to WordPress.com

Since wordpress.com is displayed next to the title above, we can fix this by reverting the submission title to that of the article. I've done that now. (Well, I used the minimally baity substring.)

(Submitted title was "WordPress launches new free AI website builder")

It's funny that the whole lawsuit thing started because Mullenweg was claiming wpengine was confusing customers, when .com and .org is way more confusing.

Very true! Oh and I would hope not.

I run a WordPress agency and while I think the block editor was foisted on wordpress.org far too quickly, it's been a godsend in terms of allowing our clients much more control over their content. The prospect of going back to the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor and templates makes me shudder.

This AI builder is actually doubling down on blocks - everything is block based and the canvas it works on is the full site editing. Without block editor, this wouldn’t be possible

The bus, when you live on the route: Get to work in 30 minutes!

A car: Get to work in 30 minutes! (you still have to live and work in the right locations for that to be true, but you now also have deal with traffic)

I signed up out of curiosity and it looks like it's supposed to complement the manual editing UI so you can get things done without digging through menus. After the initial prompt and wizard, it's a chat box that sits in the corner of a typical WP admin page.

But in its current state, it seemed pretty broken to me. I just wanted it to add text to the top of the front page, and it kept saying "I couldn’t find the block you mentioned. Describe where it is on the page or select it and try again." no matter how many different ways I attempted to describe it.

Going from a basic template to all the little changes you need to make to build the basic shell you need for a new site is still a lot of work. Think of all the best practices cruft required for the pages typically linked to from the footer. A sporting good site is different than a directory blog is different than a single serving social media aggregation site.

I think it's plausible for AI to help with the tedious setup stuff and get you to the part where you start making it your own.

I have no idea about the quality of the sites this produces, but I think your comment about non-technical folks existing is on the money. There are many people who really don't understand how to properly structure even a simple website, and being walked through a conversation with a series of pertinent questions will be a much more satisfying process.

> I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now

I did this recently for a friend and 1000% no. It wasn't easy to find a good template or edit it, and things we tried (including various builders) were a massive pain in the arse.

I asked sonnet for a site and had it right in a few minutes. I asked for changes and they just worked. It wasn't a complex site but it was drastically easier, quicker and more fun than dealing with the nuts and bolts of it all.

> Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.

Absolutely not.

Choosing customisation? Sure!

Making the customisations? Nope. I'm sure some do, but I and many others I think just want a thing.

Just asking for some changes and seeing them was great.

> Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.

Even if that were true (which I heavily contest), people might like the idea of "I want the sidebar nav moved to the right side", not opening up template.css and template.html and figuring out which html/css they need to change.

The LLM is the thing that lets us do the fun part.

But let me disabuse you of the claim that technical people enjoy fiddling with html/css/design especially on their Wordpress website when they just want to make some changes, and somehow nontechnical people are the only ones who might have to circumvent all that fun-having by letting an LLM do it for them.

It's like saying that you don't see how LLMs could be useful to software developers because don't they enjoy writing code? Aside from the answer being no, most code isn't fun to write, you're forgetting the goal day to day is to get something done, not dick around with your Wordpress theme or software Jira tickets because it's fun.

This is a solved problem even in the sense that nearly all the Wordpress competitors already offer this.

another term for it is "investor driven development".

They are much more similar to each other than Git as they share the same plugin ecosystem, core developers and the base layer CMS is identical. I imagine there are many more feature differences between Git and Github.

For 99.99% of the people, it doesn't matter. Even if Wordpress stopped getting updates today, the code already works and it's open source, thanks in part to Matt for maintaining it for 20 years.

It was just the weekly Internet drama of the programming niche probably pumped by Youtubers and influencers in need for content to drive views and then by memes. Barely anything of substance was actually written about it.

After all, if Matt were such a negative factor in the project, it would be trivial to just take all the code and fork it and then for all the developers to just move to the new project. The fact that this didn't happen shows that there is non-trivial infrastructure being provided that is separate from the open source project. How do such smart people as programmers fail to understand this when they repeatedly conflate the open source project with the whole trademark/plugin hosting thing is beyond me. Does nobody question the whole thing before pointing fingers and picking their pitchforks?

I've seen a Youtuber who interviewed to Matt in one video and the Youtuber himself raised the point of hosting costs, and then in a next video they conflate the two concepts as if they had completely forgotten about everything they said and heard. It's surreal.

They're still battling out in court, with a timeline that extends into 2027. Meanwhile: (very quick summary) Matt's pulled his developers off the project, and the release schedule has slowed. Some commercial vendors have increased their support, while others have pulled back. Meanwhile the ecosystem of devs and agencies basically shrugged it off. If we need to get rid of Matt we will (with big vendor support), no big deal.

Development has dropped off a cliff over the last couple of months. The release cycle has moved from quarterly to yearly. He's basically taking his ball and going home. My guess is we'll see more internal initiatives like this AI builder instead of focusing on the core product.

This would be an okay strategy if his core product wasn't in such a state of disrepair. I've seen multiple issues on Github projects from Automattic developers saying "this would be easy to fix upstream but we're not allow to fix anything in WordPress right now." It's pathetic and actively harming his own business.

They just laid off 16% of workers

https://www.theverge.com/news/642187/automattic-wordpress-la...

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