Mike McAlister joins Luke and Jonathan to discuss space, astrophotography, design, naming a good product, transitional phases, nuclear energy, and themes. Mike shares his perspective on product creativity, the crossroads we’re at in WordPress, and why he’s betting everything on Ollie. Luke wonders if the WordPress market is even interested in AI and stands up for poetry. Jonathan connects the dots on something he’d missed and wonders what’s next.

Transcript#

Jonathan:
Mike, I need you to either confirm or deny that the rumor I’m about to share is true. The rumor is that you like space.

Mike:
I like my space.

Jonathan:
Space as in going up into space, like NASA and rockets and all that. Is this —

Mike:
Mm-hmm. I do like that space too.

Jonathan:
Yeah. So why?

Mike:
I think there’s a great many questions and answers out there. More so than down here. And it’s infinitely interesting to think about.

Luke:
I once heard Spielberg say that every science fiction eventually comes true. That’s why he makes alien movies — because he wants to meet aliens.

Mike:
I love that.

Jonathan:
Based on some of the alien movies I’ve seen, I’m not sure I want to meet those. But that’s —

Luke:
Yeah. Well, no, but Spielberg’s aliens are usually pretty friendly.

Jonathan:
That’s fair. That’s actually a fair distinction. Mike, I’m curious — I guess maybe not so much if, but how has that interest in space, and your broader interests, impacted the work that you do in design?

Mike:
That’s a great question. I think in the general sense of being, or trying to be, a contemplative person about things like that translates to the kind of work that I do, the kind of focus I bring. Or even on the level of — one thing I like about space, I like to do astrophotography, where you go outside and take photos of the stars. On a high level. But it’s actually an incredibly meticulous and labor-intensive and kind of annoying process. But the end result is that you get this crazy photo that you’ve taken of something that’s, you know, hundreds of millions of light years away, or billions of light years away. So there’s a lot of value in that process. It’s a very meticulous but valuable process in the end.

Jonathan:
Mike, and this is something that I know Luke is really passionate about — why not just generate that with AI? Why put all that effort into it?

Mike:
Sure. It would be prettier probably, and a little sharper. But — as Luke would probably agree — there’s something very human about the pursuit and the material nature of doing it yourself. When I first did it the first few times and I actually got a picture, it was crazy to me, because these things are so abstract until you’re looking at the thing that you took. You could almost imagine that it’s all made up, until you take a picture yourself, or you look through a telescope and you see Jupiter cross the scope. It all becomes so real and so much more — I don’t know, it just creates a sense of reality in a way. So there’s so much to think about and look at out there. And most people, we just go our whole day, a whole night, and you don’t even look up anymore. And that kind of bums me out, ‘cause it’s so interesting to me.

Jonathan:
Do you find — so you’re in the Midwest — do you find that where you’re physically located makes it more conducive to doing things like that? Like less light pollution?

Mike:
Yeah, I mean, to some degree. I live in Milwaukee, which is not nearly as big as Chicago or anything like that. But I have a series of filters that I put on my telescope that cut down a lot of city glow. So all things considered, I’m pretty lucky. And then I can go further up Wisconsin and it gets darker and darker and darker. So I have access to it. With a two-year-old at home, nighttime activities are a little more difficult, so I tend to want to actually sleep now. But yeah, it’s one of those hobbies that’ll be there in twenty, thirty, forty years, you know.

Luke:
Mike, let’s talk about Ollie. Are you familiar with a little project called Ollie?

Mike:
I have heard about it.

Luke:
Yeah. I’ve always wondered — and I maintain to this day that naming a product is really hard, and that a product lives or dies by its brand, including its name. And I think Ollie is a fantastic name. I love it. There could be some criticism, I imagine — some people, not me, but there are people out there that prefer a more descriptive name. But I’m wondering, how did you arrive on the name Ollie for a theme?

Mike:
Good question. At the time — I love thinking about names for things. I always have. I grew up a designer, back in the days when we were designing logos and business cards and letterheads and all that stuff. So I did a lot of branding work back in the day, and my brain kind of loves thinking about that stuff. I have a lot of passing thoughts all the time about things — products whose names I hate, things that are interesting to me. I’ve never been super inspired by things in the WordPress space. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but I just feel like there’s been a lack of product creativity, I would say, at a high level in WordPress. And so when thinking about making something new, I don’t think about necessarily WordPress or what people think of it there. It’s more like, what sounds like something I want to grow into? And Ollie to me at the time just felt kind of light and fresh and easy and kind of fun. I could see — obviously it’s a skateboard term, the word ollie — but it’s also a popular name. Jonathan knows about that.

Jonathan:
I was gonna say — I just now connected that it’s a skateboard term. It’s really obvious to me in retrospect, but —

Luke:
Really? I only just connected the opposite.

Jonathan:
— our nine-year-old’s name is Ollie, and that’s just really strongly imprinted accordingly. But obviously like the Ollie-oop or whatever — I just now made that connection, ‘cause you have the skateboard reference on the site. It’s really obvious, but I had not connected the dots.

Luke:
Yeah, except I don’t associate it with being easy. I associate it with me falling over and hurting myself.

Mike:
I wanted to associate it with pain, you see. Set the tone for WordPress. You know, there’s gonna be a little pain.

Jonathan:
But you look cool.

Mike:
You look cool, and you’ll sound cool. And also — it’s funny, I kind of thought it was obvious, I grew up in the skate world a little bit anyway — it’s not obvious to so many people. Many people don’t know it’s related to skateboarding at all. And so it’s kind of a gift in a way. It’s not associated with that for people; they just hear Ollie and it’s whatever. But also, an ollie is the foundational trick. It’s the start of every trick, right? There’s some kind of metaphor there — you’re starting your… so there’s something there.

Jonathan:
Okay, yeah. Well, and Mike, you actually created a bit of a problem for me. At this stage, I can’t really think of the last time that I set up a WordPress install and didn’t just use Ollie as the base. It’s kind of skewed my experience with themes. And I think there’s a bigger thing there — because I’m sure that you’re not the only one innovating in the space, I know you’re not the only person — yet to me there’s not been a lot of innovation in WordPress, or at least that’s been surfaced. And Ollie, and the work that you and the team have been doing there, has been a breath of fresh air in the space, and it’s colored the lens through which I look at other product innovation. There’s been a few good examples I’ve seen, but there’s not many in the space.

Mike:
Yeah, there’s so much in that thought. One, the idea of like, why isn’t there more interest and momentum in this space? Two — this era, with full-site editing and everything else, in some ways it’s the most capable time in WordPress. And obviously what we’re able to do now with JavaScript and AI and everything else, it seems like an incredible jumping-off point for us. But also, we’re at such a crossroads in WordPress. I think it highlights all of these things at once, really.

Luke:
Do we still need themes?

Mike:
That’s the bigger — I think that’s right, Luke, that’s a great question. And there’s something I’ve said since very early on with block themes, and people didn’t like to hear it. But I was like, you won’t need more than Ollie. And it’s not because Ollie’s great, and it’s not because Ollie does something amazing. It’s because the way this paradigm works is that you might just need one thing that has your base styles dialed in, and then everything else is configurable, either in the editor or on another layer. So the theme actually is kind of — unless you want something that gives you a really drastic, wildly different design out of the box, you might go pick something like that — but for a lot of our people who are building websites and have designs to work with, or want professional-looking things, they’re not doing that. They’re generally building the same thing every time anyway. So that’s why it’s like, just use Ollie, I guess. It makes sense in that way.

Luke:
Dial in your preferences. Yeah, because it struck me that — for me, success with full-site editing means that I can take the default theme and make it look like any other theme. If I can do that, then I know the full-site editor is working. Does that make sense? Is that the right paradigm?

Mike:
A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

Luke:
So really all a theme is, is a set of defaults.

Mike:
Yep. An opinion layer, effectively. An opinionated style layer. And you could make the case that, yeah, you should be able to do it all with a base theme, one of the default themes — and you can, if you keep bending it and flexing it around to do it. But I think that’s where they’re never gonna do it opinionated enough to really get it dialed in for professional site building. Because it’s a generic theme that’s almost always presented as a blogging theme, and not quite detailed enough or set up to scale into websites. Simple websites, yeah, exactly. So like, you —

Jonathan:
Let alone things like commerce. Like you guys recently brought that to Ollie as well. That’s a whole new thing.

Mike:
— have to really put some time and effort in if you’re going to prep it for that particularly. But even just the idea of an agency using Ollie to build out a bunch of sites requires so much more resources and tooling, not just in the theme but in a pro thing, than a core default theme is ever gonna do. So you’re absolutely right on both of those counts.

Jonathan:
Mike, one of the things that I’ve been struggling with — over the arc of Luke’s and my experience over the past few years, I’ve noticed that we go back and forth, and I’m actually finding myself less optimistic these days about WordPress and the state of things. We were talking recently where I’ve been doing more site builds just using static. And it hurts me a little bit, where — I think, and Luke has challenged me on this — when you’re just generating stuff with AI, static is super convenient, but there’s very much a sameness to it all. You can recognize, oh, they did that in Claude, that design or whatever. And while that stuff may improve, there is something to be said about what’s being lost. And my challenge historically, that I think Ollie has done a great job of overall addressing, is the level of accessibility. My first couple of times going into full-site editing, I was like, this is taking a lot of time and effort, I don’t feel like I’m getting what I’m trying to get out of it, it’s confusing. And Ollie brought a lot of structure and predictability to that. I was like, okay, I can get something that’s looking good here pretty quickly that I could build on. But for me right now, I’m finding myself — I feel like I’d have to force myself to do more with WordPress at the moment. And for you, as someone who’s building in this space, I’m curious where you find the motivation. Do you feel any of that as well?

Luke:
Before you jump in, Mike, can I maybe add a little extra framing to that question? Because I feel you, Jonathan, I’m the same way. Maybe one way of thinking about it is this. It’s always been that we could hand-code our own websites. That’s the hard way, right? We could always do it the hard way — we could write our own HTML and our own CSS. And there’s some joy in that, and there’s a lot of flexibility. Or we could do it the easy way. And the easy way traditionally has been to use a CMS. You’ve got a scale of easiness, and a balance between easy-to-use and feature flexibility. But WordPress has traditionally, for us, been that easy way to build a website — I could hand-code it, or I could WordPress. Now there’s an even easier way than WordPress. Unless you want to manage content — for a long time moving forward, blogs maybe, or whatever — but for just building out a website, a brochure business site, just get Claude to do it. That’s the easy way. And WordPress is in this sort of middle gray area where I’m either going to do it myself or I’m gonna get Claude to do it. So I’m finding it hard to find the justification for taking the middle route; it doesn’t really work so much, so often. So anyway, adding that all into what Jonathan asked — does any of that make sense to you? Does that pass the Mike McAllister vibe check?

Mike:
Yeah. Clearly I’m building something in this space, and we’re all talking about whether or not WordPress is gonna live or die. And so every single day I wake up and I’m like, what’s going on? Let’s just see what happens today. I feel the same way. I still build almost everything in WordPress at this point, just because I can build it so fast. If I was starting from scratch, would I choose WordPress today? I don’t know. Probably not — unless you had those requirements that brought you here. But even if WordPress had all the stuff, if I’m a new person and I end up on WordPress.org, I’m like, what is this thing? It doesn’t really tell a compelling story of why I would choose to build a website here in 2026, in my opinion. So even if we have all the stuff, we’re not really telling a 2026 story. Which you need. There’s so many great platforms out there and everyone’s moving so fast, so you really have to have something to hook people and say, build here. I don’t think necessarily content ownership is the thing that —

Jonathan:
Mike, WordPress has AI now. What are you talking about?

Mike:
WordPress has AI infrastructure now, but WordPress itself has no AI features. They just have connectors and things like that.

Luke:
I don’t think the market has proven that it’s interested in AI, as well. I don’t know if that’s something we want to be advertising to people yet.

Mike:
I think it’s a good question. There is — I just saw some headline about, like, distrust if your product has AI in the branding or in the lead marketing. People are like, it’s kind of a turnoff to some people.

Jonathan:
I think Luke paid them to say that.

Luke:
Well, don’t you think, Mike — if there are hundreds of plugins all doing the same thing on the plugin repo, and I’m choosing one, I would take the one that says that it’s handwritten by a human over a vibe-coded one any day of the week, wouldn’t you?

Mike:
Yeah, probably. Honestly, presentation means a lot to me, if I can kind of see and like —

Jonathan:
Depends on the human.

Luke:
Yeah. Branding — it’s like I said.

Mike:
Exactly.

Jonathan:
When I look at the Ollie site — and this has been the case from the beginning, and continues to evolve — there is a level of care in the detail that gives me confidence. And then I see that in the product itself, that there’s craft to this, there’s some thought that’s gone into it. And it’s not that you can’t have those things with AI, but oftentimes with AI — I think, and I tend to be more on the positive side than Luke is on this — it looks like it’s there. It looks a lot better, but when you start to poke at it, the substance is often not there; it has the form but not so much the substance. And yeah, I’d much rather — ideally you get both. I feel like a lot of what we’ve had in WordPress historically has been more of an emphasis on the substance but without the form, which just makes it a lot less attractive. And I think you’ve, at least in my experience, navigated that sweet spot of it looking good and attractive and also actually working, and thinking carefully through, what does the onboarding look like, what is the experience like when someone’s interacting with Ollie and actually building a site with this?

Mike:
Yeah. And it’s funny, because I feel like we flip that, right? I feel like the aesthetic and that human touch, the design layer, matters maybe more than the code underneath, which is handled by the robots now anyway. I’m not one of those people who says taste is everything now, but being able to pull something together with a brand and an aesthetic and a vision certainly matters — probably more than the code underneath, because if we can all write almost the same level of code, you have to start building these little walls and advantages for yourself. But I will say — my comment about “would I choose it now, probably not, maybe not, I don’t know” — I do think still with WordPress, and with what’s going on in the web at large, there is still so much unknown right now. All of the AI stuff that we’re creating, it’s all transitional products to whatever is next. These are all just translating the previous 20 years through the next two years. We’re all creating these transitionary products that get us over this little thing, and then once we’re over here, then we have to figure out what the new era of products looks like. So all of these things that we’re building now — I feel like they’re so temporary, because they’re just plugging the holes.

Luke:
I have to push back a little, Mike, and I’m only gonna do this the one time because it’ll get tired if I keep doing it. But I do just want to stand up for all of those people out there who do believe that there is taste in code, who still believe that code is poetry. I’m one of those. And I don’t like hearing somebody say everyone can code now, because that’s not true. Everyone has access to an AI that can produce coding output, but it’s not quite the same thing. But I take your point. I really love this idea that we’re in a transitional phase, and I want to explore that further. I just want to tag it with a little caveat before we do. And that is — everybody seems to be framing AI like it’s the next internet, like it’s the next Gutenberg press. And I’m not so sure that that’s the right framing. But let’s, for the sake of this conversation, assume it is the right framing. Maybe it’s more like nuclear energy. Maybe it’s something that we have the power to do, but we choose not to. And we’re exploring and we’re excited, but maybe we just put the brakes on it as a society. I think it’s very easy to get in this mindset of “AI is the next best thing” when you work in tech. But when you look outside of our technology bubbles, there’s a lot of fear, a lot of concern, a lot of distrust and dislike of AI. So I don’t know if it’s a done deal that AI is the future. But all right — that’s my little caveat, I needed to get that one in. Sorry, Jonathan. So let’s continue.

Mike:
No, that’s — yeah. I actually, you know, I hang out in a lot of cafes around here, and I heard a lot of — not everyone is on board, and there’s a lot of distaste for the data centers, and even skepticism from family members to hop into it. I’m generally an optimist, and I want to see the best-case use of it for technology and health care — we’re using it for building silly websites — but the thing that I think brings it forward and forces it on us no matter what is capitalism and governments using it for nefarious things. It almost — now, because it’s here, it’s forced to stay, it seems.

Luke:
You lost your optimism.

Mike:
I know, I really did. And I don’t know, I just think the past few years have been kind of illuminating. So that’s where I’m like, okay, well then it’s almost like — well, they’re using it, then we should use it. And is it just for them, or is it…? So I think it raises a lot of questions of, it’s here, and now what do we do with it? How do we get them to regulate themselves with it — governments, et cetera?

Luke:
I guess that’s the optimist in me, still believing that we have some sort of agency about it. That’s what I want to believe. But like I said — let’s say it’s here. And then, look, why don’t we just start with: is WordPress going about things the right way?

Mike:
Hoo, doggy.

Luke:
I mean, I can add some more framing to that. WordPress hasn’t just [said] “here’s AI, AI writes your posts now, go.” It’s been very methodical and very careful about building AI from the very most basic foundational layers and integrating with other services, as opposed to trying to put something on top. It’s been taking it slow, but definitely — at the same time, somehow at some high pace. And it’s almost as if —

Jonathan:
Slow by external standards, but fast for WordPress standards, for sure.

Luke:
Yeah, well, that’s true. Anything is fast for WordPress standards, so anyway — sorry, that was me being a bit mean. And it just feels like now, at this point where we are, it’s there as a foundation, ready to be built on. Should we have done it in a different way — maybe partnering with external providers, partnering with operating system manufacturers, or some other approach? Has the direction we’ve gone in — the direction I think it’s fair to say that our leadership has pushed us towards — has that been the right direction?

Mike:
I do think the way they’ve approached it so far makes sense for this platform. Because it is so big, it’s so old, it’s used in so many different scenarios, that you really can’t just implement specific AI features platform-wide. It doesn’t work that way. I like the infrastructure and plumbing route, because I feel like it gives us the tools — in a standardized way, more importantly — to all plug into this new infrastructure and see what works. So all things considered for WordPress, I think it makes a lot of sense the way they did it. And I do think leadership is obviously super interested in AI, and they’ve prioritized it over other things, and I think that’s the right move. The thing that does concern me, though — and it’s not a WordPress problem per se, but maybe an aging-ecosystem problem — is that they put all the stuff in here. Now you need an army of products and product makers and brands really tying in and building on this and creating content around it and showing other people how to do it. Like at one point in WordPress’s history there was a content flywheel just automatically going — just endless content being generated on WordPress, some of it for profit and clicks or whatever, some of it not, but it was all out there. And now it just seems dry as a bone. So it’s great that we have it all, but it kind of takes this ecosystem to really take hold of it and start a new era of building into this, so that we can all start to figure out how do we make things work together, how do we have things working in a synergy so that we’re starting to create more of a cohesive WordPress experience — instead of this just plugins from everywhere and they all look different and it’s just kind of madness. It makes it so you wouldn’t want to choose WordPress. So I don’t know if that’s in our future, though. I feel like that takes so much coordination and standardization, and I don’t know.

Jonathan:
Mike, this pokes at what I was beginning to allude to earlier. When I think about the WordPress ecosystem right now, the thing that I’m concerned about that stands out to me — I don’t think that there are enough companies like Ollie, like what you’re doing with Ollie, in the space. There’s only a handful. And I could be inaccurate about that — there may be a lot more, but I’m certainly not seeing them. And my sense is that there’s just not enough of that. And to your point of who’s — so you may have plumbing infrastructure available, but who’s doing stuff with it, right?

Luke:
And who’s writing about it as well? Who’s writing the tutorials — here’s the code that you write.. in order to copy and paste this into your functions.php file..

Jonathan:
Yes. That was such a key piece early on. We had this whole flywheel effect of people doing this stuff. So my first question, coming back to it, I want to understand, Mike, what is it that you continue to find motivating about bringing the level of innovation that you are bringing to this space? Because the problem that I’m seeing is that there’s not enough of that. So step one for me is like, well, there is some — what is it that’s motivating about that? Because when I hear “well, if you were to start it over, it probably wouldn’t be this,” it’s like, well, that’s a bit of a concern. It makes sense to me. But is it just existing momentum that you find motivating? What is it that you, as a product creator, are finding motivating about working in this space?

Mike:
I’m a bit of a futurist and a technologist, and I look at WordPress and all of the technology that it does have — all of these APIs, and the editor. I actually — the block editor itself, where you write and do posts, not necessarily the site editor, but the block editor — I feel like is good and powerful, and if you were to make something from scratch you’d probably come up with something close to it. And so I see all of these things, and the product builder in me and the designer wants to make something of all of it. Because WordPress has always been great at putting all the stuff in there, but then they’re like, there you go. And it’s like, okay, cool, thank you — what do I do with all this stuff? And so for Ollie, we don’t even think of Ollie anymore as a block theme. Ollie is, like we were saying earlier, just a style layer. Think of it as just a style reset, whatever. Everything else from there up — the pattern library and all these other extensions, and the improvements to the editor that we’re making — that’s all Ollie to us. And so we’re looking at this as —

Jonathan:
Like the design system.

Mike:
Yeah, and just like the ecosystem of extensions and being able to add animations and class manager. It is all building towards what hopefully people would want to stay in WordPress for. It’s saying, yeah, all of this stuff is there, but we’re pulling it into this cohesive, comprehensive workflow or experience. And it’s got education around it and it’s got content around it, and we make videos, and really all the design is human design. I’m still a better designer than AI right now. And so I’m putting out a bunch of designs and surfacing those to people, and they can use those as a starting point, or go live with them. I still think there’s a ton of potential to put into effect what I want out of WordPress as an experience, as a site-building platform. I’m not talking about serving every single use case somebody can think of, but — if you were to think of how would you build a Webflow or a Framer or something like that on WordPress, where you get all the flexibility and the extensions and the content ownership and a design caliber, but it’s over here — there’s many good reasons for it to still be here, if you can solve a lot of these problems, remove the frictions, et cetera.

Jonathan:
One more question in this vein of thinking for me, for the moment. You alluded to this idea of a transition. It makes sense to me, and I can feel the same. My sense of WordPress right now — I even say as much. I have a couple of WordPress sites that I maintain, and I’ve been in the process of, like, okay, I don’t want to keep doing this right now. It’s actually easier for me to just move them into static sites and not have to worry about keeping WordPress up to date, or dealing with WordPress crashing because the server doesn’t have the appropriate resources, et cetera. But even as I describe that, I’m anticipating — it could be wishful thinking, but in my head I’m like, this is a transition until I can get them back into WordPress. And I’m curious for your thoughts on that, because to me — I quite like it, I think that that’s real. I don’t know what that is and what that’s looking like. I have some thoughts on it, but to me it’s a little bit more akin to when full-site editing first came out. I remember, okay, this is potential, but it required — in my head, it required products like Ollie to actually make it accessible, to where, okay, now I can actually do some building. But now I’m in a place where I’m like, I’m not sure how motivated I am to even be building in WordPress. And I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on what you think this transition period is. What is on the other side of it?

Mike:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think, in order to get you to build those sites here again, it has to be compelling. It has to be even — maybe almost not fun in the traditional sense, but it has to remove those layers of years of frustration in building in WordPress, to the point where it’s like, well, yeah, I know I can get his design going there, whether it’s through the Ollie MCP or their designs, and then I can just manage it through CLI, through the MCP. I don’t even have to go to the site really, or whatever. It has to be that smooth. And it has to have other things too. So we’re building towards that to some degree, but in terms of what’s next after this in WordPress — it’s so hard to say, because it depends on who else comes along. It can’t just be Ollie out there being like, yeah, this is this, and then me begging for responsive controls out in public, just yelling until somebody listens.

Luke:
Please. You’re not the only one yelling.

Mike:
These kinds of things have to come along with this thing. It has to evolve in a meaningful way. And then we can start to see, I think, a little clearer about, well, what comes next? Are we viable? Can I change my fonts on mobile or not?

Luke:
Well, Ollie — obviously you’ve got the free theme and the pro, and you’ve got a pattern library, and there’s the menu designer. There’s some products in an Ollie ecosystem. But do you think — if you were to go, all right, well, there’s Ollie, that’s all up and running, maybe you can replace yourself in the business, I don’t know — would you consider, if you’re gonna create a new product, would you still be creating that for WordPress, since maybe that’s what you know? Or would you be looking for a different ecosystem to explore?

Mike:
No, I probably — I think I’ve said this before — I probably will not build another thing in WordPress like this. It’s so much work, first of all. Building a distributed product in open source is so much work. There’s so many touch points. Every single site you log into or install your product on is a variable experience. You never know what you’re getting. You have compatibility issues, you have free support to do, you have paid support, you have decades of low prices to compete with and high expectations in terms of customer support. The only way I would make another business here is if I was able to really strictly define the parameters that I wanted the business to operate in, and was able to execute that. I couldn’t do it again with the historical setup that we have here. I’m more interested in maybe building products in this sphere of site creation, or whatever the next version of site creation is. But I’ve been here so long that I would be curious to do something else. Now, before people freak out and say he’s leaving, he’s selling — no, I’m here, and I’m putting everything into Ollie, because I do want it to be something that can at the very least transition people into this AI era and maybe even what’s next. So this is kind of my coup de grâce. I’m here to build this thing as best I possibly can for as long as I can. But if, you know, Anthropic comes and says, Mike, we’re gonna give you five million to come over here and really help lead this thing to success — I might say yes.

Jonathan:
All right. So one of the things that I’ve been wondering about for a bit is — is there an opportunity to make it easier for folks who build these sites in AI, like these static sites, to get back into the WordPress space? There’s this question of motivation about why they would actually want to do that. But one of the things I’ve been thinking about for a bit — that I think Ollie could be uniquely positioned for, and I’d love [it] to not just be Ollie, but we’ve got what we’ve got right now — this idea that someone could create something and then say, okay, I need whatever it is that WordPress provides, and being able to use their AI tools to get into a WordPress context, which then opens up the ability — because part of what I find attractive about this new wave of things is it’s not that we need to have a dependency. I love the open source innovation around models — it’s not just Anthropic and Codex and all this, right? But the idea that you could talk to your site, that you can lower the barrier of what it means to work in this thing that you’re creating — I’d love for that to be WordPress. And it seems very possible to me. It’s just not practical today in comparison to being able to just talk and have your static site be rebuilt. So to me, there’s this question of what makes that motivating, other than that it’s WordPress and it’s open source — “open source equals good,” which isn’t enough for me in terms of what’s gonna be compelling for adoption. So there’s that piece of it. But if we can answer that, then the next step is, how do we bridge the gap and take people who’ve made these static sites — which were so much easier to just output using those tools — but let them have that same type of experience in WordPress? That’s my best thought so far about what it looks like to bring renewed growth to the space. ‘Cause it’s still about creating content. And I’m not interested in a world where people are just generating stuff, but there’s still this opportunity for people to have their own unique experience — but they shouldn’t necessarily have to be messing around in an editor to fine-tune a header to be what they want it to be and mess with all the controls. I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that, Mike?

Mike:
I mean, first of all, we can just accept that some of the sites that used to be built on WordPress will never be built on here again. And I think that’s okay, because there are, like, simple Canva-ish sites now, okay? And that’s okay, because there are gonna be people who that is a target for. They’re gonna build a nice little website and they’re gonna be happy with it, and they’re never gonna think, I wish this was on WordPress. And that’s okay. But WordPress still provides so many affordances and freedoms of just being able to take your website and pluck it around or do whatever you want with it. You just can’t do that on so many platforms. So can you build a website and have it output on your domain? Yes. But I think there’s an even greater case now, with AI and all the tinkering we’re doing, that maybe we will need more flexibility with the things that we’re doing — the code, the freedoms, the things that we want to do with it. So I do think there’s many cases there. And then the question of, can we build that? Well, yeah, absolutely. The people who are saying, like, “is WordPress cooked?” — that bugs me so much, because it’s just such a lack of creative thinking and vision. You’re telling me you have this massive platform — I don’t even need to go into the statistics with this audience probably, they’re astronomical still. To think that you couldn’t build something that would be compelling, or more compelling than what’s out there right now for site building, is crazy to me. Of course you can. We’re trying to build it with Ollie, and I’m sure other people are as well. It’s gonna be a lot of work, and it requires way more of an opinionated direction than we’re used to in WordPress. There’s so many things you could do — build a layer between WordPress and the user to help them with that. We have branches that do exactly like this that we tinker with and see what comes of it. So I do think that future is there. Will there be as many as there have been previously — page builders and everything? Probably not, because, again, do we need so many of them? I don’t know. But there are millions and millions and millions of people using WordPress every single day. And some of them will never even transition to the AI era. Some will; some will use AI things along with WordPress. But that’s a huge opportunity for us to help nurture that audience — and whether we’re helping them transition out of WordPress or into the next version of WordPress, this more opinionated workflow through Ollie or whatever, I think there’s just a lot of opportunity still.

Jonathan:
I’m excited to see where it goes. I still feel myself in this — the future of WordPress is no longer… it’s not gonna just happen. I don’t think it’s gonna just successfully make the transition. It requires some risk-taking, it requires more innovative thinking, it requires more folks, it requires more products, I think, than just Ollie. And more of that mindset and mentality, that willingness to ask these questions, to be curious, to push the edges on things. And you do have — it’s unique, right, this open source ecosystem. Anyone can have a direct influence on what’s actually going into core. Sometimes it’s a disconnected thing where it’s like, it’s just happening — but no, there are calls for comments on things on a regular basis, if you’re paying attention to it. And I think for me, what I’m hoping to see is more folks like yourself that are motivated to actually follow along and do that, and that are bringing the product innovation — some more of that commercial thinking — to the stuff that they’re doing. So I’m excited to see what happens with Ollie in particular, and I see that as an indicator of sorts, a canary in the proverbial coal mine, if you will, for what’s happening in the WordPress space.

Luke:
Well, I think actually Mike used the better analogy there than a canary in the coal mine. I think the way that you described the opportunity within WordPress as astronomic is a fantastic bookend to this episode. So let me say, Mike, thank you very much for coming on the show.

Mike:
Of course.

Jonathan:
Mike, if anyone is interested in connecting with you, what’s the best way for them to get in contact?

Mike:
You can find me on X at Mike McAllister, or you can go to olliewp.com and check out this thing that we’ve been talking about and see what all the rave is about.