Not another blog post about adjusting a blogging platform. Well, it is. Boo hoo. A little over two years ago I switched this site over to use the visual theme editor in WordPress. The aim was to remove the fiction of diving back into my soupy mess of front end and back end tasks when I wanted to make visual edits or create new things. Instead, I could just head to the visual editor on any browser and off I go. But that didn’t really work well at all.
I found the visual editor clunky and irritating to use. The UX model is painful and often I didn’t really know what I was doing. Mostly the outputs had quirks. Jumping menus. Awkward spacing. Complex nesting of objects to achieve minimal layout views.
Theres something detracting about systems that slow us down. In 2018 I wrote a business case for why tech teams at NET-A-PORTER should be allowed to continue using Gsuite and not migrate to Microsoft Office. The core argument in the case was speed. The tools ability to reduce friction and therefore improving chances of better documentation.
The visual editor is now dead (for me). I want speed. I want to be able to draw a sketch in the morning, iterate it with an agent, refine in Figma and then watch it go live on my site within a few minutes. All before the working day starts. I want that feeling you see in music documentaries where the band or artist are jamming, figuring it out in the DAW, layering something for a bit and then boom.
We’re at such an exciting time with agent technology. I remember watching Erin, Jenifer, Jamie and Tom at With Associates using SSH to run our servers. Jamie would tell me its not that hard and really cool if I set up my system to run that way if I had the time. And I could remember what to type each time. And I had someone on call when it went wrong. And I could find the answer online. And I didn’t wipe out my entire server by mistake. My workflow has always remained somewhat slow and manual, favouring a burst of changes over reliability, speed and structure. FTP-ing and GUI-ing my way around. It’d been on my long list to one day learn SSH, create an efficient workflow and hand code a custom theme.
In comes the agent and my ambitions. Within a few hours from Saturday morning to Monday afternoon we have managed to storm through:
- Setup of a full stable local environment of this site and database
- A staging environment
- A clone rewrite of the site to take me off visual editor theme and into custom theme and plugin
- Testing and deployment of that theme end to end
- Decommissioned plugins and written functions to replace risky third party plugins, mostly my concern here is the resale of plugins from good actors to bad actors
- SSH workflows setup to allow agent to run from local, stage to prod
- GitHub repo setup
Yeah, some of this stuff is a bit spicy risk level for some folks, but, this is a personal site so better to go wild here than in a business project.
So what comes next-ish (theres still a few devops/back-end chores to do) is the fun part. Having a workflow that I can push and pull the design around in a systematic way rather than a slow painful, is it gunna break and look strange again way.
Finally, yes, I did consider binning off WordPress and going full trendy tech. But with my LAMP hosting being under £4 a month and the majority of WordPress UX being OK to use, it feels like a sane and faster choice to stay and build on top with the agent.